


Mirror, Mirror

by mylordshesacactus



Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, Mirror Universe, Sith AU, The existence of this fic is a sin, This is a sin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-11
Updated: 2015-12-26
Packaged: 2018-05-01 03:43:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 38,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5190875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mylordshesacactus/pseuds/mylordshesacactus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are no rounded edges here, no second chances, no safe answers.</p><p>This is about power.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> No, I will not apologize for the title.
> 
> TW for physical/emotional/psychological abuse, slavery, and other fun Sith things. Many thanks to Kablob, who willingly helped develop this AU and by god is going to burn with me.
> 
> IMPORTANT NOTE: This fic picks up when Ahsoka's about nineteen. As best I've been able to figure over the years, Barriss in canon is about two, maybe two and a half years older than her, putting her at about 21 at this point. When references to seniority are made, they refer to the number of years the girls have been in service to a Sith master, not their respective ages!
> 
> IMPORTANT NOTE II: Luminara Unduli is a good person who did not deserve this.

  
Burning stripes of crimson clash and hiss inches from her face.

Ahsoka grins, bared fangs red in the light of her own blade; her smile widens when it's met with a matching grin from Barriss, but Ahsoka's moment of confidence is short-lived. Reversing her grip at the last moment gave Barriss enough leverage to catch both of the blades sweeping toward her head on her primary—and Ahsoka, conveniently, has forgotten Barriss' second blade.

She senses the hard slash under her guard just in time, disengaging and throwing herself onto her back to avoid it. Barriss presses her attack, ready for the Force throw she's certain is coming; but Ahsoka's rolled with the impact and is already up on one knee. She knocks Barriss' lunge aside with an almost casual swipe of red, and just for a moment Barriss is aware of an opening, tries to close it too slowly—

But Ahsoka launches herself into a backwards, airborne somersault rather than force bladelock again, and this time Barriss holds and waits for her to move first.

“Almost had me there,” Ahsoka pants, flashing a cocky smile. She's coiled to spring, so Barriss resists the urge to give a mocking Makashi salute, but not without difficulty.

She raises an eyebrow instead. “What are you going to do about it?”

It's a high, slow leap, amateurish and telegraphed, and Barriss actually has to wait for her before their blades connect. There's power behind the blow, certainly; but rough, unsophisticated power, purely physical. She sloughs off the bladelock in a matter of seconds and strikes out with the butt of her primary. The blow connects solidly with Ahsoka's montral, causing her to cry out and nearly drop her lightsabers. An advantage, but not quite enough of one; Barriss snaps a high kick into Ahsoka's chest that sends her stumbling back, shoto coming up belatedly into a guard position as she swipes wildly with her primary, but when Barriss slashes at her ribs again she manages to recover and catch both blades on her own.

Ahsoka's snarl says clearly that the game has ended.

She sidesteps, undoing Barriss' efforts to pin her against the edge of the training ring as she throws a flurry of blows at her opponent's head. Another aggressive overhead strike comes so suddenly Barriss makes the beginner's mistake of catching it in the cross of her own blades; Ahsoka's anger, thankfully, distracts her from the unused shoto in her left hand in favor of bearing down and kicking viciously at Barriss' kneecaps.

A shove in the Force knocks her back enough for Barriss to free her sabers; just in time, because Ahsoka gives a wildcat yowl and leaps again, primary twirling at her side for another attack from above. This one's faster, less showy, and Barriss raises her blades again—just in time for Ahsoka to twist out of the strike in favor of connecting with her chest, heel-first.

There's no chance of recovering. Barriss' lightsabers are knocked from her hands before she even has time to land heavily and drive the air from her lungs. Ahsoka's knees strike the mat hard, which is briefly a relief because if she'd landed on Barriss she probably would have broken several ribs. And then there's a _snap-hiss_ of igniting blades far too close, and Barriss is disarmed with Ahsoka sitting on her chest, lightsabers crossed over her throat.

* * *

 

This is the dangerous part.

Ahsoka's been in that position too many times not to know that the moment you're first pinned is when you're the most likely to do something crazy. They're _Sith_. To say they don't like being helpless is the understatement of the millennium. She's prepared, for several long, thundering heartbeats, to put down whatever last-minute resistance Barriss comes up with. A hidden vibroblade, a hand-to-hand strike that an unsuspecting opponent might not be prepared for—a simple shove in the Force would be the most obvious route.

But Force throws take energy and concentration, and Barriss for all her furious glare is still wheezing for breath. She's gripped Ahsoka's wrists instinctively, but as she realizes Ahsoka isn't going for a kill she visibly concedes, dropping her hands to the mat and letting her head fall back.

Ahsoka holds her there anyway, for a few moments, just to make sure it's not a trick; then she deactivates her lightsabers and sits back with a wide smirk. Barriss is her senior—not just in age, because Barriss' two and a half years on her mean very little in their positions, but in that Barriss has served her master for almost ten years and by rights should have taken her own name by now.

And this is a fairly-earned victory. It's taken her a _year_ to convince her master to let her have supervised training sessions under anyone but him. There are certainly worse ways to thank him for the privilege than by returning with the news that she forced Barriss Offee to surrender, much less that she managed to do it right in front of...

Her train of thought is interrupted by slow, sarcastic clapping from the wings.

“That,” Luminara says icily, “was a truly _astonishing_ performance.”

Somehow Ahsoka is pretty sure that wasn't directed at her, and it isn't a compliment. Barriss' presence in the Force, which had been an intoxicating simmer of exhilaration and focus during their duel, starts fading to cold fear as her master's footsteps approach them.

“Well, Barriss?” Master Unduli's voice is cool, in contrast to the fury in her eyes. “Nothing to say for yourself?”

Barriss swallows and stares determinedly at the ceiling.

“I made an error in judgment, Master,” she says quietly.

“A child could tell me as much,” Luminara snaps, making Barriss flinch. After a long, disgusted look at her apprentice, she shifts her attention to Ahsoka. The annoyance doesn't leave her face, but she's at least slightly civil as she inclines her head a fraction of a degree. “You may tell your master I was pleased with your skills, apprentice. Leave us.” Her gaze darkens as she turns it back on Barriss. “We need to discuss this failure in _great detail._ ”

“No,” Ahsoka says before she realizes she's spoken.

It's probably the stupidest thing she's ever done, and this from someone who once jabbed a rancor with an electrostaff just to see what would happen; but it had been reflexive. She's still receptive to the flow of the Force around Barriss' mind and she'd felt the outpouring of miserable fear and... _responded_ to it, no need to make it more complicated than that.

Luminara stares at her, incredulous, and Ahsoka takes advantage of the brief moment where she isn't being murdered to do damage control. She ducks her head, puts her weight on her far leg to make herself look smaller, looks up without lifting her head; the picture of contrite humility. She stops just short of fluttering her eyelashes, which she figures would probably be overkill.

“I'm sorry, Master,” she says politely. “I only meant...” She shifts again, just slightly, leaning toward Unduli and cocking her head like a guileless puppy. Luminara is unimpressed. Ahsoka plows forward anyway, injecting as much sweetness into her voice as she's reasonably certain she can get away with. “I'm sure you have more important things to do? And you've already been generous enough to take the time to work with me. Let _me_ do it.”

Her hand is still braced on Barriss' sternum, but she wouldn't need that to notice her breath catch at the suggestion. Unduli doesn't miss it either; she takes in Barriss' frozen, wide-eyed expression with a calculating look. After a moment, the corner of her mouth quirks unpleasantly.

“Very well,” she says, never looking away from Barriss. “Take a reward for beginner's luck. But see that it _is_ a punishment, Apprentice Tano, or the privilege will not be extended again.”

“Of course, Master.” Ahsoka bows her head to hide her ear-splitting smile. She's careful not to move until the door to the training room hisses shut.

The moment they're alone the tension fades from Barriss' body. She lets out the breath she'd been holding in a long sigh that turns into something very nearly a giggle.

“I can't believe that worked.”

Ahsoka gives her a lopsided grin. “You know I'm irresistible.”

Barriss rolls her eyes. “Not nearly to the degree you seem to think,” she starts with a smile. “And...mmm.” Soft fingers brush Ahsoka's lekku when she leans down for a kiss. “You're very forward.”

“Weren't you paying attention?” Ahsoka kisses her again, runs her hands teasingly along her sides. “You're my reward, I can do whatever I want.” When the only response is a halfhearted swat, she grins and winds her fingers between Barriss', guiding her hands down to the mat. “Well, if you want me to _stop_...”

Barriss shrugs, as best she can manage in her position. “Did I say that?”

Ahsoka tightens her grip on Barriss' fingers and kisses her. Harder this time, more insistent, until some of that warm interest flares again and Barriss' mouth opens in a quiet gasp for her tongue. The sharp little inhale is all the encouragement Ahsoka needs; she presses Barriss into the floor and takes the long claiming kiss she's wanted for months, finally breaking away only because she needs air.

Almost before she's opened her eyes Ahsoka's fingers are already tugging at the hem of Barriss' shirt. What little patience she possessed to begin with is gone; Barriss is _hers_ , and she wants to touch her _now_.

Not that Barriss seems to object to the plan. She lifts her arms to let Ahsoka pull the clinging fabric over her head and toss it aside, and pushes herself up on her elbows to meet the next enthusiastic kiss halfway.

Ahsoka resists the urge to growl. Barriss is better than she'd imagined—lean and muscled, a few scars she can't stop herself from tracing with her fingertips but _soft_ and responsive, pressing into Ahsoka's touch so willingly she suspects Barriss doesn't even realize she's doing it.

“Ahsoka,” she says as Ahsoka's hands run over her ribs, thumb her breasts before sliding back down her flanks. “I—” She cuts herself off with a low hum and tilts her head back when Ahsoka's teeth scrape her throat. “I—Ahsoka, much as I hate to interrupt—you don't think—maybe you're forgetting something?”

“Mmm?” Ahsoka mumbles against her neck. Barriss' hand pushes at her shoulder and she sits back.

“She said—”

Ahsoka bares her teeth in a hunter's grin. “She's not here.”

Barriss throws one hand up in exasperation, supporting her weight on the other arm. “That's easy for you to say. _You're_ not the one who will pay for it when she finds out I never suffered for my failure.”

Ahsoka considers her.

“You're right,” she says finally. Barriss looks mollified for a moment, until Ahsoka smirks and shoves her flat on her back again. “I'm not.”

It takes a moment for her meaning to sink in, and then Barriss' death glare returns with a vengeance.

“You wouldn't _dare_ ,” she hisses, moving as if to sit up. Ahsoka locks her knees around Barriss' waist and pushes her shoulders back down, taking the opportunity to really enjoy the view. Barriss flushes under the appreciative gaze. After a moment she knocks Ahsoka's arms away and tries to wriggle free; Ahsoka holds her down by the wrists, drinks in the visual, and lets her try.

If Barriss actually wanted to leave, she could _ask_. Or summon her lightsabers, or throw Ahsoka through a few dozen walls. She's certainly got enough of her wind back now to do it; the Force is swirling around her and it practically _tastes_ of mingled anger and arousal. Ahsoka reflexively licks her lips.

“Maybe that'll be your punishment,” she muses before Barriss has a chance to wrangle her impotent rage into words. Ignoring it, Ahsoka leans in, tugs at Barriss' lower lip with her teeth, and starts trailing lazy open-mouthed kisses along her jaw and down her neck. “Can't make me hurt you if I don't want to. So maybe I won't.” She stops to suck on a pulse point. “Maybe I'll take you apart without hurting you at all and then send you back to your master.”

She can _feel_ Barriss' breathing stutter.

Ahsoka grins viciously against her throat. “You can go back and tell her you loved every minute of it.” She runs her nose along Barriss' jugular with a gentleness she knows will drive her mad, barely enough to be felt, and punctuates her words with nips as she moves back up Barriss' throat. “And you didn't. Suffer. _Once_.”

“ _Ahsoka!_ ” Barriss' control wavers as Ahsoka presses a light kiss just under her ear. “Please.”

Ahsoka drags her fingernails slowly from Barriss' hips, up her sides and across her belly just below her ribs. Barriss starts to arch under her before remembering she's angry.

Ahsoka grins. “No.”

Barriss lunges for her, teeth bared, in a manner that would have been much more impressive if she had proper fangs and wasn't caught halfway through the surge and thrown down again. Ahsoka gives her a pitying look before miming a playful bite at her nose.

“You can't do this to me.” Barriss' eyes are livid. “You have no right, you _promised_ , you can't _do this_ to—!”

Ahsoka shuts her up with another hard, bruising kiss and the Force boils with Barriss' indignation even as she returns it.

“You,” she spits in the brief moments when Ahsoka lets her breathe. “You—I—you _have_ to—”

“I don't _have_ to do anything,” Ahsoka warns her, tightening her grip on Barriss' wrists. “You don't like it, I'll leave.”

Barriss is fuming _._ “You _selfish_ , arrogant—”

She's right on both counts, which means Ahsoka has no qualms about cheerfully taking what she wants. Righteous outrage looks _good_ on a pretty girl. And it still doesn't stop Barriss from relaxing her jaw to let Ahsoka taste her, half panting for more even as her hands form useless fists.

She's almost being cooperative, and Ahsoka is about to find some way to reward her for it when Barriss suddenly bites down on her tongue.

Ahsoka cries out half in pain and half in shock, instinctively dropping Barriss' wrists to push away from her. Barriss actually bites _harder_ for several seconds in which Ahsoka tests the limits of a Togruta's physical ability to swear with someone hanging onto their tongue like a Mon Calamari bottomdweller crab, then lets go. Ahsoka slurs a few of her master's choice insults and attempts to suck her own tongue to make the throbbing stop. When the immediate pain stops distracting her, she tastes blood.

“Wha' is _wrong_ with you?” she demands. She doesn't get an answer; Barriss just tosses her head with a look that's both challenging and victorious. Ahsoka's fingers twitch with an urge to curl into claws and demand a thorough apology.

For a moment she considers it; and then that triumphant spark in Barriss' eye gets her thinking. After a moment, she gives a slow smile.

 _Clever_. Asking nicely didn't work, so Plan B was to make her angry. Bait the angry Togruta with the impulse-control issues. It had almost worked, too, and would have gotten her some very nice cuts and scrapes to show her master.

“Smart,” Ahsoka says, as mildly as possible, and watches Barriss' confidence falter. “That was good.”

She moves before Barriss has a chance to block her, tangling her fingers in Barriss' hair and dragging her head back.

“Not good enough,” she growls into her ear.

Barriss finally cracks, a drawn-out whine as she cants her hips against Ahsoka.

Ahsoka holds her there for a few seconds before shaking her hand free of Barriss hair and releasing the other wrist so she can sit back. Barriss looks more miserable now than frustrated, and the plea in her eyes appeals to Ahsoka's better nature.

She kneads Barriss' breasts absently while she considers being merciful. She's not running a _charity_ here.

“All right,” she decides. Barriss brightens, and Ahsoka flicks her nipple so she doesn't get her hopes up too high. “I'm willing to hear you out.”

Barriss' brow furrows. “What do you...”

“Beg.” Barriss sucks a soft breath through her teeth at the casual command, and Ahsoka shrugs. “You want me to do something I'm not interested in? Beg for it.”

Barriss grinds her teeth.

“Please,” she bites out.

Ahsoka scoffs. “That was pathetic.”

“ _Please_ ,” Barriss repeats.

“Nope.” Ahsoka runs feather-light fingertips along Barriss' sides. “Don't give me that. Your master pulls out lightning if you fold your robes wrong, I _know_ you can beg for mercy better than _that_.” She leans over her, bracing her hands on either side of Barriss' head. “What are you waiting for? _Convince me._ ”

There are several long moments of silent glaring.

Then, like flicking a switch, the offended facade snaps and Barriss grabs her lekku and drags herself up into a desperate, sloppy kiss. Ahsoka's delighted laugh turns breathy as Barriss turns her head to suck hard at the junction between throat and lek. Ahsoka's eyes roll back and she very nearly _purrs_ , tilting her head to give Barriss better access.

“Use your teeth,” she gasps.

She has to groan when Barriss obeys instantly, biting at the base of her lek before kissing and sucking her way down it. She has one arm flung around Ahsoka's neck, the other trailing along her arm as she rakes her teeth along the sensitive underside of a lek and _Force_ , she's _entirely_ too good at this. Finally Barriss flicks her tongue over the tip—a sensation much more ticklish than erotic that makes Ahsoka bite her tongue to keep from laughing as she twitches the point out of Barriss' mouth.

Barriss presses against her immediately, kissing her neck and jaw again.

“Please,” she whispers. “Please, I'll do anything you ask...”

For a moment Ahsoka has trouble remembering what she's talking about.

“You were gonna do that anyway,” she finally croaks, nerveless fingers trying and failing to tug at Barriss' belt.

Barriss gives a low whine and nuzzles Ahsoka's cheek.

“Don't you want to?” she asks, and there's an innocent earnestness to the words that would have met with wry recognition if Ahsoka wasn't using all of her remaining cognitive ability to hold off on giving Barriss anything she wants without reservation. “I'm a rival, haven't you ever wanted to hurt me?” Quick, soft wing-flutter kisses trace Ahsoka's cheekbone all the way to the corner of her mouth before Barriss relaxes her grip on Ahsoka's shoulders, just enough to look up at her. “I'm in your power, Apprentice Tano.”

Ahsoka takes a deep, ragged breath. She's certain there was an argument she was making but it's very hard to remember with those sad blue eyes looking up at her like this.

She closes her eyes in a desperate attempt to focus. Delicate fingers touch her lips, followed by a soft kiss.

“I'll scream,” Barriss offers hopefully, almost a whisper. “You'll like it.” And then, lips barely brushing Ahsoka's, “I'll thank you afterward.”

The training halls always have a wall lined with exotic weapons—no master is willing to invest time and effort into an apprentice only to have them killed by some mercenary because they never trained against their gimmicks. Ahsoka thrusts a hand out and calls a vibroblade to her hand as Barriss' tongue snakes between her lips.

Barriss' Force presence flares bright with overwhelming relief half a second before she screams.

* * *

 

Barriss' ankle turns under her at the top of the stairs.

She stumbles badly, turning at the last second to catch her shoulder on a pillar so she doesn't fall—

“ _Ah!_ '

Ow. _Ow_. That had been a mistake.

Wincing, she slowly pushes herself off the pillar, takes a deep breath, and continues down the corridor. Even her bare-bones sonic shower, she thinks longingly, will be heaven. A change of clothes, a few judicious dabs of bacta...she can wash her face, at least, and if she's lucky her master will want nothing more to do with her today and she can collapse into bed and pray the worst of it heals by morning...

She finally limps around the corner to her quarters, stops, and closes her eyes in despair.

Sadly, when she opens them, the boy is still there.

He's a little human with long red hair, ten or eleven years old. The electrobrand of Luminara's symbol on the child's right cheek is only barely healed—her master's slaves are almost always new, the tower has a notoriously high turnover rate. Most attribute it to Master Unduli's strict policy of purchasing only human or near-human slaves; so many of those, in any market, are fresh-caught adults or adolescents and humans are a strong-willed species to match against her low tolerance for disobedience.

But twi'leks and togruta are _common_ , ten credits a dozen. Everyone knows human slaves are a status symbol. Getting and keeping them requires tight security, a lot of credits, good connections, an imposing reputation. Unbroken children, not yet past their impressionable age, are even rarer and more expensive commodities. And Barriss' master has not made her reputation on half measures.

“Um,” the boy says.

“What is it,” Barriss demands flatly. She's not normally rude to slaves, especially the young ones, but most are dead in six months anyway and every inch of her body hurts. If the boy's harmed by a curt word from his mistress' heir, she hopes he dies quickly.

He swallows.

“She said, tell you to see her right away, ma'am.”

It should be _mistress_ , really, and he'll learn that quickly or he'll learn it painfully; but Barriss is not petty enough to care and too tired to warn him.

“Thank you.” Force, what she wouldn't do for a glass of water. “I'll go up once I'm presentable—”

“She said _right away_ ,” the boy insists.

Of course she did.

Barriss takes a deep breath and tries to set her shoulders. “Thank you. You can go now.”

“Okay,” says the boy. “Did you hurt your foot?”

Her feet are, actually, among the only parts of her anatomy she hasn't injured today.

“No,” she tells him, a concession to his youth, before adding, “You shouldn't ask questions in the presence of your masters. You'll be beaten if you keep doing it.”

“Oh,” he says quietly. “Sorry.”

She almost tells him it's all right, but encouraging him won't keep him alive. She steps into her rooms and lets the door slide shut behind her without another word to the boy.

Barriss is vaguely aware that it's common in the galaxy to view one's personal quarters as a sanctuary, a place belonging to no one but one's self. She can't imagine it.

She glances longingly toward the door to her bedroom. Just a quick shower, five minutes, how would her master even notice...

Which is, of course, the kind of thinking that gets Sith apprentices killed. Some masters actually make a habit of killing off their apprentices every few years and replacing them, a practice Luminara always sniffs at as both wasteful and the reason those masters rarely achieve stable, sustainable empires. Barriss is an _investment_. Of course, investments can be liquidated.

Nearly crying at the thought of turning away from the shower, she palms open the access panel in her personal library and starts limping up yet more stairs to her master's apartments.

The tall durasteel tower, contrary to popular belief, does have windows. Neither Barriss' quarters nor any of her masters' that she's seen possess them, however; the only natural light she knows of here is in the greenhouses or observatory, the latter of which is strictly for show. It's for security reasons, certainly, but Barriss has long since come to the conclusion that her master disapproves of the passage of time around any schedule but her own. If asked, she would carefully reword this assessment as Master Unduli preferring not to be distracted by changing daylight that might interrupt her work.

Barriss has also taken to wearing a chronometer at all times.

It's too early for supper however hungry she is, and even if that weren't the case there are months at a time when she's convinced her master doesn't eat or sleep. If she's left standing orders for Barriss to attend her, and assuming this isn't some ill-conceived prank by a rival (not uncommon, especially on Coruscant where there are a worrying number of them at worryingly close quarters), she'll be in her office as usual.

The door slides open before Barriss can raise her hand to knock.

She forces herself to step over the threshold and tries to keep her breathing as even as possible as she kneels in the middle of the small room.

“I was told you wanted to see me, master.”

Luminara ignores her entirely, stylus scratching over a flimsiplast pad. Barriss keeps her head down and waits.

After an interminable pause, long after Barriss' sore muscles have started to cramp, her master sets the pad aside.

“Stand,” she says without looking up. Barriss bites her tongue to keep from hissing with pain as she awkwardly pushes herself onto her feet.

Luminara stands and, finally, turns her attention to Barriss. Barriss rather wishes she hadn't; her master looks disapproving on a good day and the perfectly neutral scan she's performing now makes Barriss want to squirm. She's suddenly acutely aware of her rumpled clothes despite her best efforts, the fact that her hair is in disarray, the stiffness in her stance that comes of nothing more than favoring a twisted ankle she'd gotten during her duel but which nevertheless feels shameful under her master's cool observation.

Two fingers tilt her chin up and to the side and she flushes reflexively at the still-tender bruise the movement exposes.

It had felt...oh, _wonderful_ , burning and perfect half an hour ago in Ahsoka's arms. Painful, but not the same kind of pain as the wounds inflicted for the sake of wounding. _A gift for your master_ , Ahsoka had said darkly, and Barriss had been too far gone to grasp her words or do anything but beg her not to stop; now she's beginning to understand the message. Luminara's expression doesn't change as she studies the mark, but her voice has a sharp edge when she speaks again.

“Take off your shirt.”

“Master?” It's less a request for clarification than it is the expression of as much pathetic reluctance as Barriss dares express. Luminara doesn't give it the dignity of a response.

It had been hard enough getting her shirt _on_ again, and that had been with Ahsoka's surprisingly gentle help. Her right shoulder flatly refuses that range of motion, so Barriss has to awkwardly worm one arm free, then pull the rest over her head and slide it down her right arm. It's a slow, painful, humiliating process.

Barriss tries desperately to fight the heat rising in her cheeks, and fails.

It would be easier if Luminara would mock her, or smirk, make some derisive noise. Instead she just folds her hands behind her back and walks in a slow circle around Barriss. It's an entirely detached, clinical examination, and it makes Barriss want to close her eyes and be swallowed by the earth. Her master doesn't react at all to the cuts and bruises, electrostaff burns, the indents of teeth, the raw tracks of Ahsoka's fingernails that are starting to smart now—but her eyes spend several seconds on every single one.

A finger presses against the deep, sluggishly bleeding laceration on her right shoulder, and Barriss can't restrain a choked cry.

“What did this?” her master asks.

Barriss swallows, still nauseous with pain. That had been an accident, and frightened Ahsoka so badly she'd almost refused to continue. She'd been spinning the electrostaff casually, a joke, trying to make Barriss smile even as they worked on the patchwork of injuries that were the only thing between her and a much less friendly punishment. And she'd gone to shove Barriss up against the wall but hadn't noticed the bolo she'd knocked free earlier. Barriss had tripped and fallen sideways and there are no rounded edges in a Sith training facility...

“The corner of a weapons rack, master,” she replies shakily.

A pause, and then Luminara's inspection seems to be complete. She's still just slightly outside of Barriss' peripheral vision when she says, “You enjoyed yourself.”

Her master's quarters are always several degrees below comfortable. That's not why Barriss suddenly feels the urge to shiver.

The statement held no inflection. No hint of either scorn or accusation. Barriss fixes her gaze on the blank wall in front of her and does her best not to react. There is no safe answer. Agreement is halfway suicidal; if she contradicts her master there will be nothing _halfway_ about it. She doesn't respond. Doesn't even blink.

After several heartbeats of existential terror, her master snorts contemptuously.

“Have the shoulder and open wounds healed. Everything else stays as a reminder.”

Barriss bows as best she can. “Yes, master. Thank you, master.”

“The next time you lose a sparring match to a half-feral whelp five years your junior you'll get more than a slap on the wrist,” she says. “Get out of my sight.”

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

There is, generally speaking, a numerical limit on the number of independent Sith capable of coexisting within a single star system without deadly conflict breaking out inside three standard days.

That limit is, generally speaking, one.

The Temple on Coruscant is as close to an exception as exists in the galaxy. Barriss has overheard other apprentices, even other lords and masters, express with apparent sincerity that as a symbol of the power and history of the Sith the Temple is sacred.

She'd repeated the teaching innocently once, as a child. It's one of the few times she can remember ever hearing her master _laugh_.

Sentiment, she's learned, plays very little part in the truce laid over this system. Luminara explained it as careful avoidance of a tragedy of the commons, enforced by the simple reality of mutually assured destruction. This monolith contains a volume of ancient knowledge, rare resources, and artifacts with planet-shattering power that no other location in the galaxy has ever begun to approach. It's a beacon to them all, and all of them on some level long for it.

And so, because no Sith could ever tolerate being barred from such concentrated power and the Temple itself would inevitably be destroyed by warring over it endlessly, it is unclaimed. Always and eternally unclaimed, its wealth unplundered—because any one person who attempted to take it would invite the wrath of every other.

Temptation always simmers under the surface. The ceasefire persists only because no one is willing to be the first to die.

The rules are unspoken but absolute. Resources are fair game, but those who take without replenishing the stores with something of equal or greater value within a reasonable timeframe will find themselves no longer welcome. Holocrons are objects of jealous desire for apprentices; treasures not to be squandered on anyone who still answers to anyone but themselves. But the knowledge of the Temple, to those who seek it, is a _birthright_. Data in the Archives cannot be erased or tampered with, only added to. Solid data cubes can be copied but not removed. Damaging the integrity of the information in the Archives even to sabotage a bitter rival is an offense worthy of death.

The information-seeking itself, of course, is subject to no such protection.

Barriss winces and tries to work life back into her fingers. They cramp badly, the price of gripping a stylus for several hours on end; the stylus has also left an imprint on her fingertips as a final insult. Rubbing her eyes with the palm of her hand, she makes the executive decision to take a fifteen-minute break and attempt to reestablish blood flow to her extremities.

Most people would simply bring a personal datapad—the serial number of which would be checked upon entry to and exit from the Archives—and transfer whatever information they wanted directly. It would save hours of work and be a mercy on her hands, but she's had even the most secure datapads stolen or remotely wiped, scrambled, overloaded, hijacked, locked with a random code...nothing she's ever looked forward to having to report to her master, certainly. Anyway, there are very easy ways to find out what someone copies over from any data node, and Luminara prefers no one to know exactly what she's researching at any given time.

Barriss' handwritten notes could still be stolen, of course, or spied on via hidden surveillance equipment; but the latter is rather more effort than most people are willing to go to just to find out what a mere apprentice is reading about and the former is unlikely to do anyone any good. Barriss takes her notes in a different cypher every two weeks.

She glances at her chrono. She decides fifteen minutes is definitely the most she can spare, flips her scratchpad closed with a sigh of relief anyway as she starts flexing her fingers to try and get feeling back.

The windowsill digs into one of the healing burns on her back; she shifts slightly to take the pressure off, and sighs. The bruises are gone, and most of the burns as well; there's only one particularly stubborn one on her lower back that had blistered, and even that's only tender to the touch now. Her master's said no more about the incident.

Other apprentices have been less generous.

It's intentional; Barriss had realized that within hours. Giving her to Ahsoka wasn't a consequence for failure, not really—not when Barriss was so amenable to it, not when the physical damage would fade and was nowhere near as efficient or _effective_ as lightning. The punishment had been the aftermath. Information traveled fast among their kind; rumors and gossip about rivals traveled faster. A tryst would have attracted very little attention, Sith by design are creatures of passion, but when phrased as a _punishment_...well.

 _If I'd known it was that easy I'd have tried harder in sparring practice! Oh, man. Didn't you hear? Tano took Offee down and fucked her on the training room floor. About time_ someone _did it. Hear? I saw her, she could barely walk..._

Not, of course, that Barriss lets such base gossip affect her in any way. Though Luminara _does_ seem to be needing much more information than usual cross-referenced at the Temple these past few weeks.

“You look bored.”

Barriss, who had just been getting comfortable in the window seat, opens her eyes irritably.

Effer Vistor: twi'lek male, seven years her junior, apprenticed to a female human so unimportant in the hierarchy of power that Barriss doesn't remember her name but does recall she's heavily rumored to keep him for his looks. In the unlikely event he _is_ valued for his skill it's a sad comment on the best his master is able to afford.

“I am now,” she tells him.

He crosses his arms and leans against the wall, unperturbed. “If you're waiting for your girlfriend she's on level three in the astrometrics section. We're all impressed, we didn't know she could read.”

Barriss doesn't bristle, she tells herself, because that would be ridiculous.

“I mean,” Vistor continues carelessly, “Skywalker doesn't keep her around for her brains. She's an attack dog. At least she's good for something, though, right?”

“Well,” says Barriss before she can stop herself from replying, “I'm not the expert.”

It's somewhat surprising to hear that Ahsoka is in the Temple, actually. Her master _is_ based on Coruscant—nowhere nearby, somewhere on a southwestern continent—but rarely sends her to the Temple for anything but the occasional scan of historical schematics, a pickup of raw materials that are always generously reimbursed in the form of valuable electronics, or to train against other apprentices. She's only been here so often in the past year because, as she disclosed unusually freely to Barriss, her master wants her to get a better grasp on _politics_. If he wanted her to get a better grasp of a rotting Hutt she couldn't have said so with more disgust.

She realizes with a sigh of resignation that Vistor is still talking.

“Skywalker's cost my master a lot over the years, you know.” Apparently taking Barriss' blank look as a sign of interest, he continues, “He and Tano keep interfering with our investments, and I'm going to find out how.”

Barriss hesitates. She'd like nothing more than to tell Vistor in no uncertain terms what she will do to him if not left alone, but is reluctantly forced to conclude that this is something that vaguely resembles potentially valuable information.

So, rather than graphic threats of disembowelment, Barriss smiles and leans toward him.

“Really? I can't imagine how.”

He smirks. “Yeah, I just bet you'd like to know.”

Barriss gives the least convincing laugh she's ever had to fake, and Vistor appears to take it as genuine. “Well, I had to try. Keep your master's secrets, then.”

The idiot draws himself up at his own cleverness in not giving away classified information. “Can't tell you how I did it, but Tano's datapad's cloned.” He twirls a datachip between his fingers. “Everyone's worried about being sabotaged but the tech clone is almost undetectable. Doesn't affect function. So we get a complete record of everything she does here or anywhere.” He slips it into a pocket. “See how well they intercept our transports _then_.”

“A masterstroke,” Barriss tells him, deciding not to mention that data-clone technology has existed for centuries and was one of the most common sweeps she performed before giving up on datapads entirely. Or that Ahsoka's master has built his empire on technology.

Vistor's mention of transports has, however, triggered her memory somewhat. Like most people in the galaxy who want power but lack the skills and savvy to gain it, Vistor's master focuses heavily on the slave trade. No wonder she's desperate to undermine Skywalker.

Barriss lets her smile turn warmer, shifts her weight so she's facing him. She doesn't have to say a word; he responds to the change in body language, she suspects, without even realizing it.

“It is, isn't it?” Effer Vistor is the kind of person who is perfectly happy to think highly of himself. “No more running around or wasting credits on scouts and surveillance.”

“It sounds that way.” Barriss drops her gaze, looks up at him with a slight smile from under her eyelashes. “Whatever will you do with the extra time?”

Thank the Force, he takes the bait. Vistor's eyes suddenly flare with interest; he steps closer to her with something of a swagger. “Training,” he says with sudden casualness.

Barriss smiles and stands up to lean against the wall, letting him into her personal space. “Really.”

“Definitely,” he grins. “Saber practice, exotic weapons training...mostly physical conditioning.”

Let me die, Barriss thinks, that was genuinely his idea of a clever innuendo.

Out loud, she says, “That doesn't surprise me” and runs a finger over his chest before linking her hands behind his neck. Perfect.

She starts drawing threads in the Force as he rests his hands on her hips. “The Force is all well and good,” he says, “But it can't compare to real physical power. Stamina, you know...”

Barriss tunes him out as she starts slowly calling the datachip in his pocket to her hand. Sometimes a girl just has to make sacrifices for these things.

“...but really it all comes down to endurance.” The chip wobbles slightly in midair as she picks it up and starts it traveling. Timing will be everything here. “We should train together sometime. I'm free tomorrow.”

“I may have to get back to you,” she says with a smile. The datachip is just above his elbow when he grins.

“Great,” he says, takes his hands off her hips, and snatches it back out of the air without looking at it. She drops the false smile immediately and shoves herself off him, but backed into an alcove there's little enough space to move to.

Vistor's smug triumph at finding her out starts giving way to petty anger. “I see how it is,” he says, lip curling. “You can't get enough of me when there's something you _want_. No wonder you haven't looked at Tano in a week.”

Barriss glowers at him. “I'm finished with this conversation.”

“What'd _she_ have, half a pack of stimchew you were after?”

“I said that's _enough_.”

Vistor's hand starts drifting toward his belt. “You threatening me, Offee?”

Barriss is just about to relish having justification to kill him when a crimson shoto snaps to life inches from his throat.

“Nah,” Ahsoka says carelessly, leaning against his shoulder and examining the nails on her right hand. “ _This_ is what it looks like when someone's threatening you.”

* * *

Apparently, even Vistor isn't as stupid as he looks.

“This doesn't concern you,” he says, glaring at Ahsoka but noticeably _not_ drawing his lightsaber.

She shrugs, lets the blade of her shoto drift close enough to raise heat blisters on his neck, and yawns widely. It's not entirely feigned; she and Anakin would have had a busy week prepping for the New Year midnight special even if that _didn't_ involve whipping their underworld contacts back into line. But it also has the convenient side effect of showing off long, sharp canines. She uses a whitening agent. Togruta are _proud_ of their fangs.

It would be ridiculous to think that her _teeth_ of all things pose a danger to anyone here, in the middle of the Temple; but Vistor reacts to the threat display like any weakling.

“I was leaving anyway,” he mutters. “Frigid little...you can _have_ her.”

Ahsoka doesn't move; Vistor has to edge carefully back from her shoto blade before turning and stalking away. The handful of masters and apprentices who had been watching dispassionately to see if he was going to die shrug and turn back to their work. She switches off her saber, returns it to her belt, and glares at the floor.

Near-humans. They're all the same. And what does she care, anyway? So Unduli's chilly, cringing apprentice has a lekku fetish, so what? After the time Ahsoka'd shown her she damn well _should_. Since when do Sith apprentices get their feelings hurt over something like that? She'd still had Barriss writhing under her, hadn't she, so what should she _care_...

“He hurt you?” she asks abruptly.

Barriss snorts, and Ahsoka can almost feel her rolling her eyes. “The day I need to be protected from the likes of _Effer Vistor_ I'll deserve what I get.”

“Effer Vistor needs to learn not to touch things that don't belong to him.”

A pause. Barriss' voice is carefully even when she responds.

“I never promised you anything.”

Ahsoka's lip curls back from her teeth as she glances over. “Didn't know you had a type.”

Barriss' short, incredulous choke of laughter is a surprise. “I can't imagine a _type_ broad enough to include you and Apprentice Vistor, even if I had one.”

“Dumb muscle?” Ahsoka challenges. “ _Lesser species?_ Exotics?”

Barriss' eyes narrow as she takes a step forward. “I'm sorry, for a moment I thought you implied there's anything exotic about a twi'lek on _Coruscant_.”

Okay, she actually has a point there, but it doesn't make Ahsoka stop snarling at her.

“And furthermore,” Barriss continues, voice pitched low to avoid attracting any more attention, “I know you're _not_ dumb muscle, whatever you like to pretend, or I wouldn't waste my time on you.”

That doesn't address the real looming issue, of course, but Ahsoka doesn't mention that. Because as Barriss approached her she'd trailed a hand casually along Ahsoka's arm, not even a flirtatious motion, and then flicked her fingers slightly, and now there's a slim piece of metal tucked inside Ahsoka's glove and pressing against her wrist.

Barriss waits for a moment, then steps back again and lifts her chin.

“...Fine,” Ahsoka says after a moment. “I'll bite. What is it?”

Barriss raises an eyebrow. “The datachip receiving encrypted transmissions from the tech-clone Vistor has on your datapad.”

Oh.

Well.

That explains a lot.

Ahsoka blinks. “Then what'd he get?”

“A blank chip from the table that I was in the process of switching for the original once I had it in my sleeve. That's the price of using standard technology. He would have been suspicious if he hadn't caught me doing _something_ , so I let him.” Barriss crosses her arms, shoulders tight, and informs the window, “I believe you owe me an apology.”

Ahsoka shakes her head, grinning. “I should've known. I mean, come on. _Vistor?_ You're way too good for that guy.”

“Yes.” Barriss' lips twitch slightly. “I do have standards, Ahsoka.”

“So why'd you do it? I mean... _Vistor_.”

Barriss looks out the window with a shrug. “Should I not have?” There's a light, disinterested air to the question that Ahsoka recognizes by now means she cares deeply about the answer.

This girl is...well, she's definitely _something_. Ahsoka can't quite keep a fond smile off her face.

“Hey,” she says. She waits until Barriss looks over, and gives her most charming lopsided grin. “Get over here.”

For a moment Barriss smiles widely; then she looks away and tries valiantly to suppress it. “No.”

“Oh yeah?” Ahsoka smirks and moves casually toward her. “What, have you got plans?”

Any worry about misreading Barriss' signals vanishes when she leans against a pillar and cocks her head. “Am I about to?”

Ahsoka doesn't bother answering. She runs her fingers through Barriss' hair, fists them messily at the base of her neck, and hauls her in to kiss her.

It's almost unnerving to realize how much she _missed_ this.

Almost. But Barriss melts the moment Ahsoka touches her, molds against her, fingers clutching the collar of her shirt, and Ahsoka can't bring herself to care _why_ she wants this girl so much. Can't bring herself to care about anything but finding some way to kiss her harder, bring her in closer, get her to make that soft moan she'd given just for a moment before she remembered herself...

Ahsoka gives a low laugh. “Oh, yeah. You've got plans.” She buries her face in Barriss' neck. “I want to find out what you sound like when you're screaming because you _want_ to.”

“Ahsoka,” Barriss breathes as she's pinned against the pillar. “We're in the middle of the Archives.”

Ahsoka tightens her grip on Barriss' hair, gently, enough to pull her head back without hurting her too much. “You say that like I care.”

Barriss doesn't push her away when she leans in for another deep kiss; she sighs into it, rather, grips Ahsoka's collar tighter, and radiates pleasure in the Force. But she does duck her head when Ahsoka goes to change her angle, and Ahsoka lets her.

“I care,” she whispers.

Heaving a dramatic sigh, Ahsoka shifts back to give her some breathing room. “If you say so.” She runs her knuckles along Barriss' cheek before gently disentangling herself from her hair and taking half a step away. She tries not to sound too hopeful as she asks, “Still got plans tonight?”

“Oh! I.” Barriss puts a hand to her forehead, color rising in her cheeks. Ahsoka gallantly focuses on her face, mostly. _Flustered_ is a good look on her. “Yes? I need to...I'm not finished here, and my master may have some task for me, but...”

Ahsoka leans over to the window seat and scoops up Barriss' sketchpad and stylus. Briefly she wonders asking if Barriss always takes her notes in a mixture of what looks like Kaminoan and ancient Bothan hieroglyphics, then decides she doesn't want to know.

“Here,” she says, scribbling a series of digits into the margins. “Our coordinates and the approach vector, so you've got them.”

Barriss takes the pad and suddenly looks nervous.

“Ahsoka,” she says. “These are shuttle coordinates, I can't...”

Ahsoka frowns. “Well...yeah. We're about ten thousand kilometers out, you're not gonna take a speeder. Don't worry, it's maybe fifteen minutes by shuttle.”

Barriss folds her pad and glances over her shoulder. “I can't just take a shuttle without permission, Ahsoka!”

Oh, right. Unduli.

Ahsoka considers this for a few moments. “All right,” she says. “Can you put off bringing her the results until tomorrow?” It wouldn't be the first time Barriss pulled an all-nighter at the Temple, but her look of horror at the idea of trying to pass that deception off has Ahsoka changing tack hastily. “Never mind. I'll tell you what—I'll send one of _our_ shuttles.” She smirks. “They're better than yours anyway.”

“ _Not to the tower_.” Barriss' fingernails are digging into the pad, but she's a little more relaxed at least. “I can meet it at the Temple. I'm not hiding anything from my master, really, just...”

“...keeping her from finding out?” Ahsoka supplies helpfully.

“Being discreet,” Barriss corrects her. Ahsoka snorts.

“Whatever you say.” She holds out the stylus and ducks in to steal a quick kiss when Barriss reaches out to take it. Barriss is rolling her eyes when she pulls back, but Ahsoka grins. “Better finish those notes, your master'll be wanting them.” Something comes back to her as Barriss turns away in embarrassment, and she frowns. “And you should put some bacta on that.”

Barriss appears confused. “I'm sorry?”

Ahsoka nods at her neck. “He was nibbling on your throat, you should put some bacta on it.”

Barriss' eyebrows shoot up as she runs her fingers over the spot. “Was he? I didn't even notice.”

Ahsoka smirks.

Barriss squints at her reflection in the window. “I hardly think it needs bacta treatment, there's not even a mark and certainly not...” She pauses, and quirks an eyebrow as she glances back. Laughter dances in her eyes. “Feeling territorial, Apprentice Tano?”

Just for a moment, Ahsoka backs her against the pillar again and growls “ _Yes_.”

Barriss pushes her off good-naturedly this time, but her laugh is a little higher and a lot more breathless than usual.

She'll take it.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bit of a short chapter this round, but I needed the setup! Things are gonna start to really pick up from here!
> 
> (Also, as I hope is clear, I know there's a LOT of Legends material building up how Sith worked when there were a lot of them. Given this is most definitely a parallel universe--Mirrorverse, not an alteration of the canon--the rules are different.)


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nice long chapter this time! And oh man. Shit gets REAL pretty soon.

Ahsoka falls asleep to the sound of engines.

She has every night for the past five years. At first she'd hated it; when her master first took her on she hadn't been able to sleep at all without the profound silence and whispering grass of the Shili plains.

But those quiet nights had been a long time ago, before the mining guilds. The clan hadn't been able to keep Ahsoka from fighting with the warriors; so she'd been one of the survivors, out on the plain and away from camp when the guilds got tired of native resistance and had bounty hunters make the problem disappear.

Even today the memory is crystal-clear. The slave transport of captured warriors being intercepted by a Sith Lord hadn't exactly given them cause to celebrate; she'd been glaring silently with the rest of them, blood boiling at the monster with his mystical powers and laser sword who had to have come to make himself their owner, turn them into his property, _tame_ them...but then Anakin had _recognized_ her, something ringing in the Force between them. And _everything_ had changed.

She can still taste the slavers' blood, feel the hilt of the old-fashioned folded-durasteel dagger Anakin had tossed at her feet. That knife is on the wall to this day. Her, with a dagger; twelve Zygerrians, with electrowhips and blasters. But her _real_ master had snapped her shock collar with a gesture, and that was all she'd needed to take her clan's revenge. All she'd needed to prove herself and take her place at his side.

Outside, from one of the garage complexes sprawling out around them, a podracer engine comes to life with a deep growl. Ahsoka grins and rolls over.

Their complex has noise-canceling fields, of course, or they wouldn't be able to hear themselves think; but the high-end podracers and racing-speeder engines work at such a low frequency that some of the sound always bleeds through.

And they're _always_ testing them. The dangerous purr of high-powered speeder engines is as good as a lullaby now.

Ahsoka has clanmates down there, somewhere. She still visits them sometimes; Anakin encourages it, says that those connections make her stronger. She doesn't know the names of every single worker on sight the way her master does—even the gamma shift, the ones Ahsoka's barely ever even seen—but she's learning.

The arrangement's simple. Everyone in their operation started as a slave. When Ahsoka and her master _acquire_ them, by killing their owner or intercepting them en route to auction or demanding them as tribute from a protectorate, they become rescued workers. They're never abused or starved, they don't split up families if they find them together, and no one is ever sold or given away; they don't deal with the slave trade. If Anakin doesn't need or want a slave they're left behind with the transport ship or their former master's estate to find their own fates.

Technically, if they _want_ to leave, all they have to do is ask.

But Coruscant is a big, nasty place, and Master Skywalker runs one of the tightest and most successful racing and space-tech operations in the galaxy. The dorms are clean and safe, there's three solid meals a day. Workers on any given team get one percent of the profits from their team's project; one percent per race for the speeders and podracers, one percent monthly for the commercial products. Pilots get another one percent per race won. And then one percent of the total profits for the operation are gathered up every month and split equally among everyone, including the non-mechanical workers who otherwise wouldn't get their cut.

This kind of racing is a multi-billion credit industry. One percent per race, even split among a team, is more than enough to keep former slaves happy while still leaving Anakin his 97 percent to play with. Ahsoka only knows the overall idea of where and how he invests it; he shares his plans with her and takes suggestions but she's never really _gotten_ it. She's perfectly happy to let her master deal with the bureaucracy.

That's the nice thing about them. So many Sith master-apprentice teams end up on opposite sides of a bladelock because the master is paranoid or the apprentice is greedy. Ahsoka _likes_ being Anakin's apprentice; she gets to have all of the fun with none of the paperwork. And Anakin knows it, and is _very_ invested in keeping it that way.

So Ahsoka gets her stipend to use how she likes and follows her master's orders, and Anakin is nice enough to phrase some of them as requests. It works. And sometimes he surprises her with orders to develop her own project within certain parameters, just to test her critical thinking skills. She'd gotten to pilot one of those projects, once—came in fourth, but he'd seemed satisfied and actually put a team on it to tweak it into a proper racer. She's called the _Shili Huntress_ now, low and sleek, and her team has high hopes for her in next year's Boonta Eve Classic.

Faintly, muffled almost below hearing by the interference field, a more distant engine test roars at the night. After a moment it's answered by another and they echo back and forth—gamma-shift teams showing off, trying to snarl louder than their neighbors, like wild things arguing over a mate who will still lie down together for warmth, competition forgotten, when winter comes.

Ahsoka smiles, pulls a blanket over her head, and goes to sleep.

* * *

The display blossoms outward, a massive digitized explosion of orange flame. Barriss groans and braces her head in her hands.

In theory this shouldn't be so _difficult_.

Part of her wants to grumble over her master asking the categorically impossible. _Forceflame_ , once thought to be a natural Force gift of a Sith lord thousands of years dead, is now believed to have been a chemical weapon. That means the awe-inspiring white-gold fire described in so many texts _should_ be possible to replicate. Simple, even. There are countless theories even just on the Holonet as to how it could be done. Barriss has her doubts about the ones from sites that also include manifestos on how those who condition themselves to disbelieve in the Force can make themselves immune to everything from suggestion to actual lightsabers, but if she continues to meet this level of success she may end up putting them into the simulation program as well.

If no one has managed to recreate this substance in millennia of trying, what makes her master think _Barriss_ will be the one to do it? Her specialty is in history and translations, not weaponized chemistry.

She rubs her eyes, takes a deep breath, and dutifully notes down the combination and concentration of the chemicals used, calls it Mixture 74-H, and does her best to describe the explosion briefly for filing purposes before attaching the recording of the simulation.

There has to be something she's missing...

She's tried putting each mixture through different dispersal systems, testing their interactions with the specific atmospheric conditions of the planets Forceflame was reported to have been used on, even run a cross-reference to see if the uses of the weapon were at a certain time of day to see how that might affect its appearance. Unfortunately there seemed to be no such pattern, so it was a waste of an hour, but Luminara at least has always valued thoroughness over speed (within reason) and had actually given Barriss some mild praise for thinking of it.

It's always a relief to be in her master's good graces. A state of affairs unlikely to last if she doesn't figure _something_ out.

Barriss decides to call it a night when she realizes she's been staring at a blank screen for ten minutes. This calls for a change of tactics and she'll come up with a plan tomorrow, but for now she can barely pull herself together enough to stand. She makes a note at the bottom of her reportand connects the datapad to a wall port to begin uploading everything so her master has access to the files. There's nothing more she can do without sleep.

She'd asked for a light supper, something she could graze while working, and the kitchen took her at her word; there's still a few knotgrass crackers and a cheese cube lying on a plate at her desk that she eats gratefully on her way out. She sets the plate aside for a slave to take care of later and collapses into bed with relief.

Three hours later, Barriss would be ready to kill something if she wasn't too exhausted to move.

It's too quiet. She can't sleep. And she can already feel herself starting to make the kind of decision that can only be made at 0300 hours when the sheets are too soft and the darkness is too absolute and even though her suite is climate-controlled to her exact specifications she still feels cold without—

This is ridiculous. The only reason she can't sleep is because the stress and artificial lighting has thrown off her circadian rhythm, and now that she's worrying about falling asleep she's created a feedback loop. She has a bottle of sleep aids in her 'fresher and she should just take one.

Barriss lies in bed for five more minutes staring at the ceiling, then gives up.

She grabs the datapad and chronometer from her bedside table and her handwritten notes from her desk and is out the door before she can give herself time to think. She scares a few of the slaves on the graveyard shift who are polishing a handrail at the bottom of the stairs, spares a moment to nod to them before making her way to the landing bay.

After all, she's never actually _asked_ if she needs permission before taking one of the shuttles.

There's a mechanic—an older male, his work must be good if he's still around—running a diagnostic on the T-6. He goes pale and jumps to his feet when Barriss enters the hangar bay, and she holds up a hand to forestall his hurried apologies. Technically speaking he should always be prepared for one of them to enter a room, but at this time of night expecting that is ridiculous.

“I'm taking the Eta,” she informs him, tapping out the code for the blast door and ray shielding over the hangar-bay entrance into a control panel. As an extra touch she decides to scan her palm print—not technically necessary, but the last thing she needs is to look as if she's trying to keep this trip a secret. “There's no reason to disturb my master, but if she asks for me before I return you may tell her I was restless and wanted to clear my head so that I could focus.”

It's not, strictly speaking, a lie; and the mechanic will make _absolutely certain_ the message reaches someone in a position to pass it to Luminara, now that Barriss has made it his responsibility alone.

She no longer has the scribbled set of coordinates—even with her personalized cyphers, Barriss recycles her notes the moment she's decoded them and passed them to her master—but she opens the document on her datapad and feeds them into the shuttle's navicomputer. As soon as she's out of the landing bay she switches to autopilot and sits back, exhausted.

This is so _stupid_. She doesn't even know why she's doing it. She's just...tired. Tired and confused and lonely.

She surprises herself with a long, jaw-cracking yawn that leaves her feeling lightheaded.

...Mostly tired.

Struggling to keep her eyes open, she sits back in the Eta's comfortable bucket seat and waits.

Slightly less than twenty minutes later the shuttle's landing thrusters start to kick in as it picks up the approach vector, jolting Barriss out of her daze. She looks out the viewport as Skywalker's operation looms bright on the sweeping turn; the night-shift floodlights are too intense to her weary eyes, but she's forced to smile just as she had the first time she saw the complex.

Anakin Skywalker's approach to security, as in most other apparent facets of his life, is to take refuge in audacity.

Most facilities of this kind on Coruscant are largely underground, with surface space at an unimaginable premium; Skywalker, by virtue of sheer personality and persistence, has managed to set up his operation with everything but storage and a complex series of test tracks on the surface level. Ahsoka says it's because he wants his people to be able to have sunlight and fresh air, or what passes for fresh here. It's...sweet, in a way, and Barriss can believe it of Ahsoka's master even if she knows the main reason he's set up such a massive, sprawling enterprise. It's a clear symbol of his own influence—he's done it to prove he can. But that he takes genuine pride in his workers' quality of life is...well, almost quaint.

Certainly there are slaves of her master's who haven't seen sunlight since they were purchased.

Setting up his personal residence—an almost modest five floors, ray-shielded but otherwise identical to the garages and dormitories and development labs filling the property—in the center of his own racing operation is as good as kicking back and making a rude gesture at the galaxy.

It's brilliant in its simplicity, really. None of his rivals can attack him here even if they got through security. Damaging a vassal's welfare is how reputations die; and it wouldn't just be an attack on _him_ , either. Anyone rich or influential enough to have invested in Skywalker is bound to have a Sith patron, or be a vassal to a Sith lord somewhere. It's bold to the point of obscenity, and it works.

A questioning whistle comes through the comm system, and Barriss smiles sleepily. “Hello, Grapes.”

R5-Y9, who is not responsible for the fact that Ahsoka once thought her ID sounded like 'Wine' and nicknamed her accordingly, gives a rude squawk and beeps at her for her clearance code. Realizing belatedly that 'Ahsoka's expecting me' doesn't work at...she glances at the chrono...half an hour past midnight, Barriss switches her datapad back on and reads off the series of digits Ahsoka had given her.

With a series of beeps that sound like a lecture, Grapes opens a square segment of the security grid and lets her through. She takes the shuttle off autopilot and brings it in for a quiet touchdown in Ahsoka's landing bay. One of the Eta's wings bumps a starfighter; Barriss hopes she hasn't scratched the paint. Of _either_ ship.

Somehow, it's not until she steps off the shuttle that she realizes she's still in bare feet.

Force, what is she doing here. She just wants to _sleep_.

She knows her way around the facility, or at least the third floor of it. Ahsoka has this floor to herself and from the right-hand door to the hangar bay it's straight, then the first left, first right, left again.

By the time she waves the door open, hand trembling from fatigue, Ahsoka has already sensed her.

Or rather, she's sensed _someone_. Barriss steps carefully over the threshold, thick rug a relief on her feet after the cold wood in the hallway, and can feel in the Force as Ahsoka's hand curls around a lightsaber hilt under her pillow. But Ahsoka's waiting for the intruder to make a threatening move; so Barriss crosses the room slowly. Not that she could move much faster with her head feeling so heavy.

She can sense Ahsoka tensing when she sits down on the edge of the bed, but she doesn't end up with a lightsaber at her throat and she no longer has the energy for caution. Grateful that Ahsoka always has a few extra pillows, she lays down heavily at the edge of the bed and closes her eyes, feeling slightly feverish with exhaustion and more stupid than ever. It's not as if they've ever slept together, except as a euphemism. She has no idea why she thought this would work.

After a long moment, Ahsoka heaves a sigh in the darkness behind her and rolls over, tossing a blanket over them both and pulling Barriss back against her chest.

Briefly, Barriss considers offering an explanation. But she's _so tired_ , and Ahsoka is soft and warm and stable against her, and she's asleep before she can think of anything to say.

* * *

Eventually, Ahsoka is going to realize that the glove she's looking for is lying on the fur rug behind her.

And normally Barriss would have pointed it out to her by now, but she's had a good day and she's feeling playful. Ahsoka grumbles to herself as she peers under the bed; Barriss, perched cross-legged on the mattress, leans over to snag a black-leather armband from the bedside table and hangs it jauntily off one of Ahsoka's montrals.

This earns her a flat look, but Ahsoka doesn't respond except to pointedly remove the armband and slide it over her elbow.

Barriss has decided she rather likes seeing Ahsoka like this, animated and eagerly professional. It would be a poor Sith, after all, who restricted himself to tinkering with engines; Anakin Skywalker has something of a protection racket running in scattered systems all across the galaxy, except that he's genuinely never punished a system for refusing his protection. It's possible he doesn't quite understand how rackets are supposed to work.

Of course, he doesn't really have to. Any system stupid enough to give a Sith Lord offering protection a flat refusal will find themselves buried in problems soon enough without Skywalker going to any trouble. And he has to know it. His second offer is never as generous as his first.

Protection has a price. By all accounts he's reasonable enough—even Luminara's demands are always reasonable, though Barriss hastily chides herself for the thought. Of _course_ her master's demands are reasonable, she requires nothing more than what is hers by right. Barriss has heard that line countless times. It's a careful balancing act; ask too little and your service to the world is devalued, but free people will always throw off a tyrant eventually. Like Barriss' master, Skywalker never takes more than his due.

But, also like Luminara, he never takes less.

Ahsoka looks up with a vicious grin. “I can't wait,” she says, drawing a pair of high, polished boots in front of her to start working them on. Barriss raises an eyebrow at the choice. Normally Ahsoka favors a more practical matte-leather design with buckles. This pair is only brought out for, in Ahsoka's words, special occasions. She _is_ looking forward to this trip.

Barriss unfolds herself to put her feet on the ground. “Why is that?”

“Oh, man.” Ahsoka rolls her eyes. “You have _no_ idea. This guy, I mean...It's a mining world, not enough other resources to support a colony, so they have to import food and supplies, even water. They basically put out a sign _begging_ pirates to hijack their caravans and hold them for ransom, and we came in and offered to help them and the company leader called us thugs and told us to leave like we were a couple of bounty hunters!”

Luminara would have seen that he was killed before leaving the system, she'd never tolerate an insult like that; but Skywalker has a different approach, so Barriss waits.

“Anyway.” Ahsoka gestures dismissively with one hand. “Almost three weeks later when half his workers have died already and communications are being jammed he finally manages to get a message through begging us to come back and save them—I mean, it's a _miracle_ he's not working for Black Sun right now, they must have been asleep to miss an opportunity like that—and everything was fine, they pay us in processed ore every six months. We've kept up our side of the deal.”

Barriss sighs. Oh, yes, she knows this story. “But now that the pirate problem is gone he doesn't see why they should pay such a premium.”

Ahsoka gives a tight smile. “You'd think he'd have learned his lesson. What would your master do?”

Barriss doesn't have to think about it. “Kill him, or give him his one warning if he's a valuable enough contact. If his only role is as a provider he can easily be replaced with someone less arrogant, especially on a protectorate world.”

“Oh, we thought about it. But I think Anakin's idea was better.”

“Really.” Barriss can't help but feel she shouldn't be hearing this. Skywalker's interests don't even come near intercepting her master's, so they've never had any tension; but they're certainly not allies. In a way, Ahsoka is still a rival...

“He didn't think he needed us anymore,” Ahsoka says. “So we left.”

“Oh no.”

Ahsoka smiles darkly. “About a month ago. Pulled all of our defense turrets, early-warning systems, merc patrols, everything. Had, uh...Jarzyn in Accounting write up a really polite message about why we were leaving, how _we regret losing such a mutually beneficial enterprise_ and all that, made sure it mentioned the guy's name who tried to cheat us and sent it to everyone on the colony. Hand me that?”

Barriss looks around for a moment before spotting the headpiece on the bed next to her and handing it over.

Ahsoka unfastens two of the straps, leaving the others intact in favor of just slipping her lekku into place. “So you can imagine how well they took it,” she continues casually. “He's dead, the new leader has real influence in the colony and they view her as an actual figure of authority and not our puppet, and Anakin's graciously accepted her apologies for what happened last time and agreed to come back.” She fastens the headpiece around her back lek and tightens the clasp, baring her teeth. “So now we get to sweep in and scatter the Pykes!”

Barriss has to smile at how happy she sounds. “With one glove?”

Finally, Ahsoka shakes her head. “It's on the bantha pelt, I wanted to see how long it'd take you to crack.” She laughs when Barriss pouts, kissing her cheek before crossing the room to grab her wayward glove.

Barriss takes the opportunity to glance at her chronometer.

It always makes Ahsoka unhappy when she does it too often, but Barriss will take that as a far lesser price to pay than only being able to see her on the rare occasions they're both at the Temple, or having to arrange for Ahsoka to send one of Skywalker's shuttles with a chauffeur droid like she's a child. She'd expected her master to be furious after her ill-advised borrowing of the shuttle several months ago, but other than mild instructions to leave an estimate of when she expected to return next time Luminara had barely seemed to notice. They've been more confident in these visits since, being careful to make sure Barriss can't possibly miss a sudden assignment; staying too long will put that in jeopardy, and it's not a risk she is willing to take.

She _won't_ lose this. She won't chance it.

“Well,” says Ahsoka, checking the fastenings on her gloves. “That's everything. I should probably get going—oh!” She digs in a pocket before holding up a copper datachip with Skywalker's logo embossed in the surface. This is tossed onto the bed next to Barriss. “That's for you. It doesn't work on the elevators, but it's got my code for the security grid, the third-floor landing bay and the lock on my door. Since I know you're having an affair with my shower.”

Barriss rolls her eyes and pretends she isn't blushing. “Yes, you've caught me. It's all been a lie.”

She can't help it if she has a healthy appreciation for Ahsoka's real hot-water shower. Sonic showers are a constant trial for togruta with their vibration-sensitive montrals, and Skywalker can certainly afford a concession to his apprentice's species; but Barriss can't help but be fascinated by it. Her master would never even consider such an indulgence in her quarters, and orphanages on Mirial have too many expenses already without wasting credits on unnecessary luxuries when sonic showers are more efficient. She'd only ever experienced one before on rare occasions when she and her master were guests of a very wealthy vassal.

Which isn't to say Barriss isn't still a _little_ embarrassed over the time Ahsoka pulled her into the shower with very obvious intentions only to be immediately forgotten in favor of the hot water. She just insists it was entirely understandable.

Her fingers hesitate over the passkey. “Are...you sure?” They're not enemies, but they _aren't_ allies, to casually hand over access like this...

Ahsoka shrugs. “Sure. Try not to bomb R&D, but...I don't know.” She suddenly seems defensive. “You said you like it here, so I figured you might want to be able to borrow the 'fresher or something while I'm gone. You don't have to take it.”

“No,” Barriss says quickly. “No, I...thank you, Ahsoka. I appreciate your trust.”

Ahsoka relaxes. “No problem.” A lazy, flirtatious smile spreads across her face. “You gonna be here when I get back?”

Barriss blinks. “I'm sorry?”

Ahsoka crosses the room with what can only be called a swagger. “You,” she says lightly, hooking her fingers in Barriss' belt and tugging her to the edge of the mattress, situating herself comfortably between Barriss' legs. “Here. Bed.” She drags teasing fingernails down the inside of Barriss' thighs. “Waiting for me.”

Barriss' lips twitch. “I'm sure you'd like that.”

“I _would_.”

She tries very hard not to smile. “I'll certainly be happy to see you again. How long will you be gone?”

“Probably two weeks.” It's not as much of a blow as Barriss was expecting; they've been meeting about once a week for some time now, sometimes twice; she'll miss Ahsoka, but she'll live. Ahsoka, meanwhile, is mouthing teasingly at her jaw. “How happy?”

“You're fishing for compliments. I do have actual duties, you know...”

She's forgotten what they are, currently, but with Ahsoka's nails still scratching at her thighs and the lingering kiss being pressed to her lips she can be forgiven that much. After a moment she remembers herself enough to continue, “Not all of us have so little oversight that our only scheduled obligations are—”

Ahsoka, grinning, catches Barriss' face between her hands and kisses her again. Warm fingers start to wind into her hair.

“I...of course I'd _like_ to greet you, don't be ridiculous, but _oh_...”

She's vaguely aware that she was trying to form words. The moment Ahsoka tightens her grip in Barriss' hair and pulls her head back, she couldn't have remembered her own name.

It's not as if she doesn't know the story. Everyone knows it, Ahsoka's made _certain_ everyone knows it; the slaughter of her clan, the Zygerrian captain she'd killed with her teeth as barely more than a child. It's not as if she doesn't know what Ahsoka's capable of, what the fangs scraping over her unprotected throat could _do_.

And, Force, the thought _shouldn't_ make her eyes roll back in her head and her legs fall open like this, but it's a moment of blissful incoherence and the only thought she can cling to is that she wants Ahsoka to _bite_ , harry and wring her into submission, hold her down, claim her, _take her_...

Ahsoka's gaze is locked on her face, ice-blue eyes focused and burning. It takes several long moments for Barriss to find her tongue.

“I'll be here,” she whispers, and Ahsoka beams and kisses her. This time it's a celebration rather than a seduction, deep and long but not hard; Ahsoka's enthusiasm ends up tipping Barriss over backwards and she laughs and presses another kiss to her forehead. Barriss sighs softly as Ahsoka hums, nuzzling into her temple.

“If I don't leave now,” she mumbles, “I'm never going to. Lock up behind me.”

Barriss takes a moment to run her hand over Ahsoka's lek.

“Go on,” she says with a smile. “You shouldn't keep your master waiting.”

* * *

Ahsoka twitches the throttle and whips her starfighter around a comm tower, considerably closer than the approach vector dictated. It gives a satisfying growl under her hands, echoing her own frustration.

“ _Ahsoka_.” She glares at her comm unit as her master's voice comes over it. She's got no interest in exaggerated patience today. “ _Watch the_ _afterburner._ _And ease up on that ship, Maintenance has better things to do than waste time fixing_ your _starfighter if you keep choking that engine._ ”

“I know,” she grumbles.

“ _Ahsoka_...”

She almost opens the throttle again as the shielding on her landing bay flicks off in the distance; she only holds back because she can see a mechanic silhouetted in the bright lights and doesn't want to scare them. That, and her master's threatened to put her on desk duty for a month twice already during the flight home. The only thing worse than politics is data entry.

“I _know_ , master,” she says as she guides the starfighter into position.

“ _And you could stand_ _to lose the attitude. We're discussing that once you cool off._ ”

Ahsoka sighs. Going by experience, _discussing her attitude_ means that even if she doesn't get stuck on desk duty after all, she's gonna be spending the next few weeks sorting tiny engine parts, fixing fiddly control chips in droid production, or any of a thousand other little tasks that force her to concentrate and take her time. Anakin never shuts up about how drawing power from her emotions won't get her very far if she loses sight of the larger goal while she's doing it.

Yeah, whatever, so he's right and she knows it. Doesn't mean she has to _like_ it. And she's never going to forget the time she'd been careless and irritated and accidentally mixed up a few washers and bolts while sorting. He'd made her go through all of them _again_ , by hand, until she got it right. She's been more careful since then.

But at least he'd called her up for a sparring match afterward and let her work out her frustration on him. Being told to just deal with it is...ugh!

“ _Lunch tomorrow, you can show me what you've come up wi—_ ”

Ahsoka cuts her engine petulantly. Oh, she's gonna _pay_ for that, but she's too pissed off to care right now.

“Evening, ma'am.” Their staff and workers don't have the level of wariness around Sith in a towering rage that they probably should have. Especially not the ones who rotate up regularly to the main complex. This one's a Trandoshan named Chrixin who catches Ahsoka's modified helmet without blinking when she tosses it to him. She forces a smile.

Normally they'd talk—he's cool, a permanent fixture up here because his seizures got bad and Anakin didn't want to risk keeping him in factory maintenance, mostly alone and surrounded by hard duracrete and sharp metal. So now he's one of their housekeeping staff, a pretty good friend who's teaching Ahsoka to make his trademark stew. At least he knows her well enough by now to just wrinkle his nose in sympathy when he sees her expression; she wouldn't want to hurt his feelings. She punches his shoulder lightly as she passes, to take any sting out of the fact that she really doesn't want to deal with people right now.

The only concession she makes to Anakin is to detour through the lounge and grab a blank datapad before heading for her room.

She _hates_ politics. At the moment, she's not feeling too friendly toward Black Sun either. Which is a problem, since she's supposed to have at least five suggestions by tomorrow for ways to _appease_ them.

It was supposed to be a standard shock-and-awe campaign! Come in, scatter the interlopers, make sure it was the last time they had to sweep in and save an otherwise-insignificant planet. Maybe Ahsoka'd jinxed it by talking about it to Barriss, because as it turned out, Black Sun _had_ swept in while they were gone. And they didn't take kindly to losing such a convenient source of valuable ore.

Well neither did Anakin, and while it wasn't likely that Black Sun would ever be able to prove they'd been jamming transmissions when he demanded the occupiers contact their vigo to confirm they were acting with permission he still thinks it would be smart to offer some kind of gesture of good faith. The last thing they need is Black Sun deciding to slowly kill their operation as a matter of pride.

Anakin's handling the smooth-talking, luckily—and it's not like it'll be that hard to convince them that they thought the occupation was suspicious and provide the evidence that the operatives had been skimming in their payments back to the leadership. They hadn't even had to fake those, actually. But the clear-cut two weeks of free-for-all had collapsed into a dull, filthy month of undercover investigation and carefully planting and gathering evidence, slipping credits to the right people and asking the right questions.

They'd finally made their move, but all Ahsoka'd done was cut a few wires. Anakin was the Sith Lord, _he'd_ been the one who was able to call a meeting with the agents in charge, and he'd been the one who got to slaughter them all once she'd sealed the exits. There hadn't even been any pieces big enough to get any satisfaction from stabbing when he was finished.

And there'd been two more weeks of cleanup and instruction-giving after _that_. She's still covered in a layer of dust and grime from the mining facility and is beginning to think no lightweight metal is rare or valuable enough to be worth the trouble even if the stupid planet _is_ one of only a handful of places in the galaxy to get it.

 _Appeasing Black Sun_. They shouldn't have been there in the first place!

She needs a shower, she feels gross. Only half of that is probably due to the actual dirt, but it won't hurt, either. She shoves the door open with the Force from halfway down the hall rather than bother with a handscan and tosses her datapad at Barriss with little more than a glance toward the bed.

She's in the middle of yanking on the fastenings at the back of her shirt when she pauses.

Now that she thinks about it, there _had_ been a shuttle in the landing bay already. It just hadn't registered, she's gotten too used to seeing it.

“...Hello,” Barriss says nervously.

It takes a moment for Ahsoka to actually register what's going on, but she's grinning long before that. “What're you doing here?”

Barriss is curled up in the middle of the bed reading a datapad, propped up by a small pile of pillows and looking like she's been very comfortable there for a long time. She fiddles anxiously with her datapad at the question, like she's afraid she's done something wrong.

“I _said_ I would be here,” she points out.

Well...yeah, but...she'd been _joking_ , playing a game, she'd just been teasing her. Barriss had to have realized she didn't _actually_ expect her to know when Ahsoka was getting back when even _Ahsoka_ didn't know, right?

“You didn't have to do that,” she says. Barriss blinks and looks surprised; Ahsoka's rather taken aback herself at how softly the words come out. The urge to go over to the bed and remind herself what Barriss feels like pressed against her is almost overwhelming, and she only restrains herself because she's still covered in dust and ash and isn't in the mood to change her bedding tonight.

She certainly has a new appreciation for the phrase _a sight for sore eyes_ , though. Black Sun is, for the moment, forgotten.

“You,” she says as she goes back to unfastening her shirt, “Stay right there. Take a shower yet?”

Barriss gives her a reproachful look. “I do have my own, you know.”

It's the weakest protest she's ever heard, and she tries not to smirk too broadly as she shoves her shirt into the laundry chute. “Sure you do. I'll try to leave you some hot water.”

Turns out to be easier said than done; it's been a long month, and this is one of those times when Ahsoka fully understands Barriss' love affair with her shower. Sonics may get you just as clean, but they don't feel half this good on sore muscles.

She finally shuts the water off when she feels like a living sentient again, considers grabbing a robe before deciding it's too much trouble and just wrapping a towel around her shoulders.

“All yours,” she announces. Barriss, having put up her token insistence that no, really, she's not here for the hot water _at all,_ jumps up.

Ahsoka catches her around the waist as they pass each other. She'd been planning to say something low and teasing, give Barriss something to think about; instead she finds herself just holding her there, sighing with pleasure at having her close.

Maybe the spacelag's worse than she'd realized, Ahsoka thinks when she finally kisses Barriss' temple and flops down on the bed to wait for her. Or maybe she's just got good taste and Barriss is soft and cute and she likes holding her. Who's gonna say anything about it here?

With the edge taken off her frustration and then some, she picks her datapad back up and starts jotting down vague ideas. It's not like she wouldn't have calmed down and acknowledged that Anakin was right eventually anyway. They don't want to give Black Sun any reason to start thinking they've got a claim on the mining facility so any _goodwill donations_ of ore are out of the question. But there's other things that could be sent their way, of more immediate use to them...

She looks up and grins when the 'fresher door slides open.

Barriss smiles back, stifling a yawn behind her hand. She's wrapped in one of the robes Ahsoka keeps in there; a fuzzy black thing she'd never wear that's too short on her anyway, she's not even sure why she keeps it but it certainly suits Barriss. Her hair is still damp—the shower has a drying function, actually, but Ahsoka's learned by now that she likes the feeling of letting her hair dry on its own. Ahsoka doesn't have hair, so she assumes this makes sense.

Ahsoka hadn't checked the local time until Barriss yawned; Force, it's later than she thought. Habit would have her toss the datapad aside and pull Barriss into her lap, but she's comfortable where she is. The decision to wait and let Barriss come to her doesn't meet with any protest; Barriss sits down on the other side of the bed, crawls over to her and gives a long sigh of relief as she curls up against Ahsoka's side, head resting on her shoulder just inside of her lek. Ahsoka leans into her and feels her smile against her neck.

“You're tired,” she observes.

Barriss hums something noncommittal and nuzzles closer. Ahsoka glances at her, fighting a smile, and starts undoing the ties of her robe. She takes her time, watching for any sign that Barriss isn't enjoying it; Barriss doesn't respond to it at all, which makes Ahsoka's decision for her. If she was functionally awake she'd make no secret of what she liked.

She turns her head to press a kiss to Barriss' forehead, then returns her attention to her tentative list of appeasement strategies. She runs a hand over Barriss' side under her robe at the same time, guides her closer; she's not _that_ much of a gentleman. But it's just that, touching her to remind herself that she's there, and Barriss relaxes into her.

“Careful, Offee,” Ahsoka murmurs into her hair. “A girl could get used to this.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't say I didn't warn you.

 

Ahsoka pops the cockpit of the aethersprite almost before the engines have time to die. She springs out onto the wing, dropping to the ground with a wide grin. She's never actually picked Barriss up in person before; she loves this fighter, but the primary cockpit's only got room for one and she wants to at least say a proper hello before nudging Barriss into the retrofit gunner's seat.

Barriss, leaning against a decorative pillar, smiles as Ahsoka crosses the landing bay. For a moment Barriss opens her mouth as if to greet her; then she suddenly laughs.

“What?” Ahsoka calls. “Have I got something in my teeth?”

Barriss shakes her head, blushing faintly. “It was just a thought,” she says. “With the starfighter, you just made me think...” At Ahsoka's uncomprehending look she fights off a full-fledged grin, leans back against the pillar again with her arms crossed, and says in a very poor imitation of an Outer Rim accent, “Feeling lonely, spacer?”

Ahsoka snorts violently—Barriss can do _inviting_ easy as breathing, _sultry_ doesn't work on her—but puts a little extra cockiness in her stride anyway, hooks her thumbs in her belt as she makes a show of looking the Mirialan over. “I could do with some company.” And then, because she can't resist, “How much?”

“Ahsoka!”

Ahsoka's laugh as Barriss shoves her shoulder incredulously could more accurately be called a cackle. “What? You started it.”

“I can't believe you,” Barriss mutters. The overall effect is ruined when she turns to kiss the palm of Ahsoka's hand as she tucks a strand of flyaway hair behind her ear.

“I bet I can get you to forgive me.”

Barriss rolls her eyes but doesn't resist when Ahsoka slips two fingers through her belt and starts backing up, pulling her along. She does glance at the aethersprite, though, and sends Ahsoka a skeptical look. “Really,” she complains. “A starfighter? You couldn't have taken a shuttle?”

“You're demanding today,” Ahsoka says conversationally, steering them so that she can lean against an alcove and giving a sharp tug that pulls Barriss up against her. “That's a high-end piece of custom technology. It's _unique_.”

Barriss props her elbows on Ahsoka's shoulders and crosses her arms, leaning in comfortably to look up at her with a raised eyebrow. “It's a Delta-7,” she says dryly.

Ahsoka gives a lazy, montral-splitting grin. Six months ago Barriss would have recognized the design by sight, but wouldn't have cared enough to have committed the model to memory even if she'd heard it somewhere. “It's a Delta-7 _body_ ,” she corrects, pinching Barriss' side and making her squeak. “Mostly. Anakin thinks the design's a classic. But it's all custom underneath. Entirely new steering system and redesigned controls, and one of _our_ engines. Twice the power, more efficient landing thrusters, retrofit inboard hyperdrive. Plus the paint job's shiny.”

The paint job is actually a solid matte black, for stealth purposes, with an experimental no-shine protector over it to prevent scuffing. Look, that's not the point here.

Barriss waits a moment to make sure she's finished, then clears her throat.

“Ahsoka,” she says patiently. “Stop talking about your ship and kiss me.”

Oh, it's tempting; Ahsoka's _itching_ to touch her. But she shrugs instead, links her hands in the small of Barriss' back. “Why do I have to do all the work?” she asks, tightening the circle of her arms just a bit to take any sting out of it. “You want something, take it. You're pretty clever, I bet you can shut me up.”

Barriss' eyebrows go up. “Really.”

Ahsoka smirks. “Did I mention we modified the fuel-injection manifold for 35% greater efficiency and—”

Barriss' groan is muffled when she pushes herself up to kiss her, a noise Ahsoka is certainly not going to complain about and would very much like to hear her make again. Barriss holds the kiss long enough that she gasps softly when she pulls back, pausing like she's waiting for Ahsoka to take up the slack.

Ahsoka smiles against her lips. “And we've been working on ways to increase power flow through the plasma conduits so that—”

“Stop _talking_ ,” Barriss pleads, and this time she pulls Ahsoka down to meet her, one hand clutching her back lek and the other curled around the back of her neck as she presses into her. Ahsoka takes pity on her enough to run the tip of her tongue once, teasingly, over her lips. The reaction she gets is more than worth it. Barriss whines quietly, relaxes her spine to press herself flush against Ahsoka; dull nails dig into her lek as Barriss clings to her, slurs her name half in a whisper against her mouth.

The hangar bay door slides open with a quiet hiss, probably a slave coming in for routine maintenance. Barriss falters slightly at the sound, then bites Ahsoka's lip and winds even closer for another deep kiss. For a moment Ahsoka lets herself be smug. Wouldn't have pegged this girl for an exhibitionist, but she's just _full_ of surprises.

With her back to the wall and Barriss nuzzled up to her chest, Ahsoka spots Unduli half a heartbeat before Barriss senses her arrival. Animal instinct has her try to leap back, as if looking guilty and defensive isn't the worst thing she could possibly do under the circumstances.

If Ahsoka hadn't looked up and given herself that split-second advantage, she never could have done it. Before Barriss has a chance to do more than tense Ahsoka tightens her arms around her waist and jerks her back in, dipping her head and burying her teeth in Barriss' neck.

 _Mine_ , she thinks fiercely in the second and a half it takes for Barriss to push her away. She glances up at Unduli and sucks _hard_ before giving in to the frantic shove on her shoulders and releasing her hold.

* * *

Barriss stumbles back several feet, one hand coming up to touch the angry red mark on her throat before hastily dropping back to her side. Luminara's expression is stormy, but she doesn't hurry or so much as break stride as she crosses the hangar bay.

 _I'm going to die,_ Barriss thinks faintly.

Every footstep winds her fear tighter; she folds her hands behind her back and stares wide-eyed at the floor until her master stops in front of her.

Luminara snaps her fingers in Ahsoka's direction without looking at her, and flicks them like she's dismissing an incompetent slave. Ahsoka visibly bristles, but doesn't move.

Barriss had flinched when Luminara raised her hand; her shoulders are still tight and high when she finally speaks.

“Master,” she asks the floor in a shaky voice. “Is there something I can do for you?”

For one, three, five heartbeats there's silence. Barriss starts, hesitantly, to look up for instruction—

 _Crack_.

Barriss cries out before she fully realizes what's happened; her knees strike the duracrete and she curls in on herself without thinking, clutching her burning cheek. Her breath hisses through her teeth. For all the force behind the blow there won't be any lasting damage; the hard, open-palmed slap _hurts_ , but her pride is wounded more than her face. It doesn't take the sting away.

After a moment she looks up with watering eyes. Her master is watching Ahsoka coolly.

“You were dismissed, girl.”

Ahsoka's fists clench at her sides as she gives a low warning growl, and Barriss knows her well enough by now to recognize a catastrophe in the making. _Ahsoka_ , she thinks, _don't do it,_ _she knows a power play when she sees one,_ _she_ wants _an excuse to_ _kill you. J_ _ust go, you're only making it worse..._

Barely daring to speak above a whisper, she says “Jus—”

“ _Silence_.” Luminara's voice snaps like thin ice, freezing cold and deadly. Barriss fixes her gaze back on the floor.

After a long moment in which Barriss can almost _hear_ Ahsoka's teeth grinding, she gives a stiff, shallow bow. “ _As you wish_ , Master.” There's another agonizing beat of hesitation before she snarls under her breath and stalks away. Barriss doesn't dare breathe until the purr of the starfighter's engines fades into the distance.

She can feel her master's eyes on her, and tries very hard not to move.

When Luminara finally speaks, her voice is filled with quiet disdain. “Have you no shame, girl?”

“Master,” she says, her voice smaller than she'd like. Part of her wondering where she's getting the nerve, she continues “I'd finished my assignments for the—”

“I expect this kind of behavior from a cantina dancer, not a Sith apprentice.”

Blood rushes to her smarting cheeks. “It's a private hangar bay— _Ah!_ ”

She bites down on a cry of pain as Luminara drags her to her feet by the hair. She turns to face her master once she's released and has to fight the urge to back away to a safer distance.

“I have a task for you,” she's informed coldly, “if you can manage to go five minutes without making a spectacle of yourself.” A datachip is all but thrown at her chest; Barriss nearly fumbles the catch. “I want these symbols analyzed by an expert in the city. The coordinates are enclosed. You are to wait for his translation and return with the data cube immediately, after which I expect you to begin work on the project you would have received already if you had been in your _quarters_ , _apprentice_.”

Barriss' humiliated resentment doesn't make any sense. Her master has every right to demand her time and energy to assist her work. But suddenly she hates being sent to her room like a disobedient child. She hasn't done anything _wrong_.

“I haven't disobeyed you, Master,” she says as loudly as she dares. It comes out as a muted mumble.

Immediately, almost faster than she can track, Luminara catches her under the chin and forces her head up until Barriss has to look her in the eye.

“Repeat that,” she says mildly.

“I...” Barriss holds eye contact for a moment and then drops her gaze. “I'm sorry I inconvenienced you, Master,” she recites dully. “It won't happen again.”

Luminara releases her wordlessly. Barriss closes her eyes, half expecting to be struck again, and only relaxes a little when her master turns on her heel to walk out of the hangar bay. She forces herself to open her eyes and stumble toward the nearest shuttle before her master can get to the door. The last thing she needs now is to be accused of wasting time.

* * *

Barriss nudges a dumpling with her fork.

Her eyes ache already just from the preliminary setup for her new project. She hasn't eaten since breakfast and the vegetable dumplings one of the kitchen slaves brought for her are hot and smell delicious, but she's in no mood to eat.

It's simple enough, and exactly the kind of project Barriss excels at. Anyone can land on Ziost and pick over an abandoned temple ruin, but this one...well, the name is long since lost to time but the coordinates are familiar. There have always been rumors of artifacts of great power, stories that famous holocrons commonly believed to be lost or destroyed were kept in the vaults there before the temple's destruction.

Most ruins have been picked clean or mostly clean by now; Sith treasures are only held sacred if they happen to have found their way to the Great Temple on Coruscant. But the destruction of _this_ temple had been especially suspicious. The wreckage is fused together, impossible to move or dig through, and the stone itself is of a peculiar quality that defies any attempt to scan the wreckage past its outer layer; inaccessible entirely. There are accounts of people finding their way in—many accounts, of varying reliability. But these accounts are scattered and contradictory, nonsensical; with so many more easily-accessible ruins on the same world, the contents of one pile of rubble rarely capture anyone's attention for long.

Of course, Luminara has never been accused of a short attention span. The idea sounds so obvious when laid out in a message; track down, translate, combine every single surviving account of the temple before and after its destruction, paying particular attention to mentions of its interior no matter how insignificant. Bring them all in one place, and create a working model of its current layout.

She can do it, probably; she's formed a reference list of the records, maps, diagrams and ancient tomes she'll need access to, and she's going to have to upgrade the schematic-modeling software in her holoprojector...it's not that it's impossible, certainly not nearly as frustrating as the Forceflame project. She's already begun combing through some of the more accessible accounts, reporting her progress to her master nightly.

But it's _time-consuming_ and impossible to automate; she can't set new parameters for serial experimentation and leave the system to run them while she slips out to sleep or meet with Ahsoka. There have been a lot of late nights in the past week and a half, and it's only going to get worse.

She pokes her dumpling again.

This is going to mean weeks and months working out of...she takes a moment to count. She uses her flimsi pad for miscellaneous notes, a datapad to organize all the references she finds, two sets of schematics—the original and her working model—and then whichever account she's analyzing, so no less than five different surfaces at a time. And her master's been adamant that all other projects be put on hold during the process...

Force, if she's able to leave her office in the next year it'll be a miracle.

She startles when the alarm on her chrono starts beeping loudly, glancing at the time as she switches the function off. She hadn't realized how late it was already.

Not surprising, considering how long it's been since she left the tower. A project like this, she'd expected to be traveling back and forth from the Temple almost every day—but her master has been providing the reference materials she'd listed as needed, either the originals or electronic copies. It's...well it _should_ be a relief, certainly it lets Barriss get a lot more work done, but resource acquisition day trips have always been a welcome opportunity to get out of the tower and wake her mind up a bit. Her sleep schedule is already beginning to suffer.

She pushes the untouched plate of dumplings away, grabs her datapad off the table and stands, wincing as her spine cracks. Another reason she normally prefers to do her own information-gathering: it lets her move around a bit.

She technically doesn't have a set meeting time with her master; _technically_ , Luminara is within her rights to demand Barriss' service at any time and Barriss is perfectly allowed to request an audience with her if she has anything to ask or report. But she's been punished enough times for either bothering her master too often or holding back information that she didn't think important enough to trouble her with that Barriss strives for a happy medium. One report every other day unless something very interesting comes up, at a time she's found has the highest likelihood of Luminara being available.

It's not a guarantee, but it's the best she can do.

She gives a small sigh of relief as she reaches the top of the stairwell and can sense that her master is down the hall in her personal archives, rather than her office. She's _almost_ always in a better mood when she's working from the archives. Barriss has also earned her share of painful lessons on the subject of interrupting her master when she's reading, but the odds are in her favor.

She raps her knuckles lightly against the door rather than use the louder buzzer, and after a moment there's a small swell in the Force and the door slides open.

Luminara doesn't move when Barriss steps over the threshold, but she looks up from a datapad to acknowledge her and sets aside a glass filled halfway with what looks like Alderaanian whiskey.

“Apprentice,” she says mildly.

Barriss kneels; after a few seconds Luminara releases her with a wave of her hand and she stands again, smoothing down her skirts. “Progress is slower than I would like, Master, especially in the older accounts,” she confesses. “I can't tell yet if there will be enough information to create a coherent recreation, but there are more references to the architecture and layout of the temple than I had expected.”

Luminara raises an eyebrow. “You had doubts?”

Very carefully, Barriss replies, “Reservations, Master. Regarding my own abilities. I wanted to ask permission to wait to begin work on the reconstructed model until all of the references have been collected and I've been able to sort them, actually. I feel that otherwise previous assumptions may cloud the final product and affect its accuracy.”

There's a slight pause, and then her master inclines her head. “Granted. Your work has always been of high quality. I have no need for a flawed visual model to monitor your progress by.”

Barriss lets out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding. “Thank you, Master. I've been reading the sources thoroughly rather than scanning them. I realize it takes much longer but I've already caught at least one reference to a staircase that may be valuable, which I don't believe would have shown up in a word-association search.” She hesitates. “I expect to work my way through Andale Hasea's history of the region in the next hour. I had intended to follow that with the work of Prince Valara from his stay there while it was still intact before moving on to the accounts of accidental access, to keep my notes clearer.”

Luminara's attention is already back on her datapad. “I thought as much.”

“...Is there anything you wish me to copy for you from the Temple tomorrow then, Master?”

Her master glances at her, looking faintly surprised. “There's no need for that. I have the original compilation.” She nods toward a stack of old, physically-bound books set up on a workstation nearby. “When you've finished Hasea's history you are free to join me.”

Barriss tries not to wince. “I...would still need to copy over Jax Sedeya's diaries eventually, Master,” she says politely. “And the Kiber Linth reports.”

She's never read them personally, but by all accounts Sedeya is remarkably eloquent for the kind of bounty hunter who manages to stumble into the most inaccessible Sith temple in the galaxy by sheer chance. Barriss will have to trust the analysts who had access to the originals before their owner burned them one night, as Sedeya's handwriting became increasingly less legible the longer she was trapped in the temple and after she lost her right hand, but it's a minor inconvenience. Linth kept no diaries, but there are years' worth of his doctor's reports of his nonsensical ramblings that may contain vital clues. Those originals, she knows, are not in her master's library.

Luminara seems unperturbed. “I'll have them sent to you,” she says idly, not looking up from her datapad.

Barriss swallows back her disappointment. “Thank you, Master.” She glances at the pile of ancient journals; they are so viscerally unappealing next to the thought of a warm bed that she works up the courage to say, “Actually, I had hoped...” All right, perhaps she'd worked up less courage than she thought. “Hasea is far from a light read. Once I finish with him, I was planning to begin Valara's journals in the morning.”

“Very well.” She blinks rapidly; Luminara never agrees to anything this readily. “If your research has been so strenuous, by all means go to bed. I shall send word that the slaves are to leave you undisturbed.” Finally, she fixes her gaze on Barriss. “Unless that's _not_ what you were planning.”

Barriss very slowly takes half a step back. “I...was hoping to...to take a few hours to myself, Master. To clear my head so that I could start in with fresh eyes. I...never mind.”

“No,” says Luminara. “Do go on.”

Ignoring the alarms ringing wildly in her head, Barriss swallows. “I wouldn't be gone long,” she says desperately. “Just a few hours, to...relax...”

She can't help but flinch at Luminara's short, incredulous laugh.

“If you have enough energy to play the whore to Skywalker's whelp,” she says, ignoring the way Barriss' shoulders tighten at the insult, “you can stay exactly where you are.”

“I only...” Her voice trails off at the look in Luminara's eyes.

“Sit down,” she says. There's no anger in her voice, which makes it all the more dangerous. “And remember your place.”

Barriss bows woodenly, fighting back unwanted tears of frustration as she flips open the first journal. It's not _fair_ , she's been applying herself to her work above and beyond anything she's been asked to do, she hasn't done anything to earn being punished. Her master would be furious if she said so, she'd insist that requiring Barriss to attend to her duties is not a punishment; but restricting her privileges _is_ , and she's _always_ been allowed to see Ahsoka as long as she finishes her tasks for the day first...

“You can't just keep me away from her _forever_ ,” she mutters under her breath.

It takes a moment for the sudden wave of cold to wash over her as she realizes what she's just said. Hands shaking slightly, praying she didn't hear, Barriss looks up at her master.

“Master, I didn't mean—” Barriss starts hopelessly. Luminara silences her with a twitch of her fingers.

“On your knees,” she says dispassionately.

Barriss pushes herself to her feet, shaking her head and backing away; she knows it's a futile gesture but she can't help it.

Luminara stands slowly. “I said _on your knees_ , girl.”

“No—”

“ _What?_ ”

She cringes at the mistake and stumbles backward as her master advances on her. “I didn't mean it like—Master, please, it was a mistake, I didn't mean it, it wasn't like that, no, I'm sorry, I just wasn't thinking, I'm sorry, no, _please—!_ ”

The lightning catches her in the chest mid-sentence, throwing her against the wall and driving the air from her lungs. Pain ripples along her body, white-hot and paralyzing, choking her as she screams.

And then it's gone and she drops bonelessly to the floor, barely managing to cover her face before she collapses. She takes a long gulp of air and shivers.

Her master stops just close enough to make Barriss press back against the wall, bracing for the next blow.

It comes immediately, tearing a shriek from her throat; her hands clench out of her control, clawing at her arms. This time it's longer and she can't hold herself curled in a ball; a violent spasm wracks her body, and she bangs her shin on the edge of _something._ And then this wave, too, is cut off.

Luminara waits until her screams fade into frantic gasps before speaking.

“I see now,” she says, “that I have been far too lenient.” Another burst of agony, this one short enough that Barriss claws at the carpet but doesn't have time to scream. “I made a mistake in indulging your idiotic infatuation with that girl.”

Barriss cringes violently as her master makes a sharp gesture; this time it's not lightning, the Force rearing up like a durasteel bulkhead and slamming her into the wall. Her head cracks against it before she's dropped again.

She can't see Luminara's expression, but her voice is thick with disgust. “You should _never_ have been allowed near some half-trained rival without supervision. If this is how your behavior is impacted when I allow you the slightest amount of freedom, you are clearly not ready for it.” Barriss' whimper is abruptly blown into a full-throated scream as another tongue of lightning rips through her.

The force of it's thrown her onto her back; once her vision clears she can see her master shaking her head. “I should have had her eliminated months ago,” she says, completely emotionless. “I judged a war with Skywalker not to be worth ridding myself of a minor annoyance, but now that I see the kind of defiance you've learned from his apprentice I may have no choice.”

Barriss tries to protest only for her throat to close around itself. She clenches her fists against the carpet—there's nothing physical to fight, she knows that, she _won't_ give her master the satisfaction of—but some things are reflexive and she breaks, gagging and clawing at her throat. The pressure is released; in the moment between Luminara dropping the choke and summoning another bout of lightning she cries, “Please, it was my mistake! I misspoke because I'm tired, _please_ , Master, this has nothing to do with Ahsoka—”

Instantly the iron grip around her airway returns, but this time it's accompanied by a vicious pull in the Force; Luminara sidesteps calmly as Barriss is thrown tumbling halfway across the room, only stopping because she slams into a desk.

She yelps at the impact; the desk is well-made and the legs are hard metal where her hip glanced off them. If nothing's broken she's left patches of skin in the carpet, and before she even has time to cover her face again she's caught in yet another rain of lightning that seems to go on for ages. This time, when it's dropped, her breath refuses to come in anything but a shallow wheeze.

“The next time I hear that name from your lips,” Luminara says softly, “you lose a hand.”

Barriss stares up at her, breath caught high in her chest, too afraid to move. After a long, charged moment, her master's hand comes up again and lightning strikes her in the chest.

“ _Pathetic_ ,” Luminara informs her as she sobs for air in the aftermath. “The years I have devoted to training you, all the power in the galaxy at your disposal if you have half a mind to take it, and you lower yourself to sniffling on the floor over _that_. You could find a dozen just like her in any slave market in the galaxy. The girl's half-feral! She has the cognitive and strategic skill of a particularly dense anooba with impulse control to match, and yet you actually _respond_ to her sniffing after you like a bitch in heat.”

“That's not fair,” Barriss whispers. This time when power jolts down her spine she doesn't have the strength to scream.

“Isn't it. Well, then, Barriss.” Another, much longer burst of agony; this time the convulsions go on for several seconds after the pain itself stops. Her arm falls limply to the ground; she decides to just leave it there. “Enlighten me. Are you too much a fool to see when you're being used for your body and a cheap thrill of power, too short-sighted to care, or are you _honestly_ so weak-willed that you cannot help spreading your legs for the first warm body with the bare minimum of self-assurance necessary to bring you to heel?”

“Ahsoka, she—she's...kind to me...”

“ _Kindness_. And that's your explanation for all the times you've come to me looking like you've been savaged by a wild animal? If you're so desperate, use one of the slaves.”

Unable to hold back a helpless sob any longer, Barriss tries to roll over as if not having to look at her master will help. Before she has a chance, Luminara's heel presses down on her outstretched wrist. There's a muted _click_ , and a lightsaber hisses to life far too close to her face.

Luminara lets it hum there for several long seconds before she speaks.

“I did warn you what would happen if you said that name in front of me again.”

Barriss's breath catches. Without thinking she tries to push Luminara off her arm; the lightsaber blade very nearly presses against her cheek, and she forces herself to lie still.

“No,” she whimpers, unable to stop herself from trying to pull her hand back. “Please...please...”

“I've heard enough from you.”

Barriss bites her lip to hold back a low moan of terror as the tip of the saber blade drifts over her forearm. After a long moment, against all odds, it turns off.

“Clearly, the stress of your recent schedule has been too much for you if you're incapable of remembering simple instructions. See it never happens again.”

Barriss closes her eyes, dizzy with relief as Luminara releases her arm.

This time, somehow, she isn't ready for the lightning.

It's not hot with fury the way the others have been; this one is cold, but cold that _burns_ , cold that makes her writhe and choke for breath and her fingers go numb with pain, cold like needles under her skin, that leaves her shivering and giving long, keening sobs long after the bolt itself has finally disappeared.

It takes many drawn-out, gasping minutes, this time, for Barriss to be aware of anything but how much she hurts. It takes longer for her to be able to bear opening her eyes; when she does, she finds her master no longer standing over her, though she can sense her nearby. She doesn't care enough to do anything but curl up and try to make herself a smaller target for the galaxy.

After a minute or two passes she's still shaking, but manages to grip the desk and pull herself to her feet.

Her master is sitting back at her workstation, glancing back and forth between a datapad and a larger display screen as she stops occasionally to enter a value. She doesn't look up when she addresses Barriss.

“Consider yourself confined to quarters until further notice,” she says evenly, matter-of-factly, as if nothing out of the ordinary has occurred.

Well. It hasn't. Not really.

Barriss collapses three times on her way back to her rooms; it would be five except that she takes one look at the spiral staircase, sits on the top step, and inches down it carefully rather than break her neck.

Her stomach growls as she uses the bannister to pull herself to her feet again, but a glance confirms that one of the slaves has already been through and removed her untouched supper. She can't help but think her master ordered it; the slaves are used to her being called away halfway through eating, they should have known better...

The door to the stairs slides shut behind her. Moments later she sways badly again and braces herself against the palm scanner.

It gives a loud, angry error tone and flashes red.

Barriss stares at it.

After a moment she swallows hard. She'd planned to stumble her way directly into bed, but...taking a deep breath, she strikes out in the opposite direction. She leans most of her weight on the wall until she reaches the exterior door to her quarters. It locks from the inside. She places her hand over the scanner.

The scanner flashes red, and beeps an error tone at her. _Confined to quarters_. She would have obeyed the order, she wasn't stupid. Being under orders to remain in her rooms had been bad enough. Removing her clearance from the building's security mainframe—being locked in, _trapped_ —treating her like a moody child had only been insulting, this is—she feels stifled already, like she can't breathe. She's Sith, she was never meant to be _caged_.

As if Luminara doesn't know that.

She stands there staring at the touchpad for too long. Her legs give out under her without warning and she falls heavily onto already-bruised hands and knees. After a minute she stops reeling from the pain; and then there's nothing she can think to do except rest her head against the locked door and cry.

 

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just so everyone's aware, the rating's been bumped as of this chapter Because Reasons.

 

“ _Thank you_ , Nariki,” Anakin says pointedly.

Ahsoka shoots him a filthy look. Normally they just bring the workers in on their conversation as a sign of appreciation, make them feel like part of the goings-on. Anakin only pulls out the careful manners when he's trying to not-exactly-subtly tell Ahsoka that she's being rude and he doesn't appreciate it. She dips her head in the general direction of the twi'lek worker refilling their glasses; it's just barely polite enough to satisfy him, mostly.

“Why don't you and the others go eat,” he tells Nariki. “We can clean up after ourselves tonight.”

Translation: my apprentice is sulking, so she might as well sulk and wash dishes at the same time while I do something _important_ and _Sith Lord-y_ somewhere else. Ahsoka viciously stabs her steak—she's too angry to remember what it's made of, too gamey to be bantha but not tough enough to be gualama.

“'course. Thanks, sir,” is Nariki's reply; she leaves the pitcher of water near Anakin, gives a quick bow that's more of a polite nod than anything, and lets herself out.

For the better part of ten standard minutes, they eat in silence.

Finally, Ahsoka can't take it anymore and slams her fork down, rattling the table.

“I'm _going_ ,” she says.

Anakin calmly takes a sip of water. “No, you're not.”

Her fingernails dig into her palms. “It's been three weeks, Master! She would have contacted me by now!”

“And I understand that you're worried!” Anakin sighs and shakes his head. “Be rational. Try to think about this calmly.”

“You sound like a Jedi,” she sneers, shoving herself onto her feet and turning for the door. “ _You're_ the one who's always telling me to trust my feelings. Well, something's up and I'm finding out what.”

“Ahsoka.” It's her master's voice, but ringing with power and dark promise at her back. “Sit _down_.”

She freezes halfway to the door, then bares her teeth.

“Whatever,” she mutters, and keeps walking.

There's a swell of anger in the Force and some part of her expects this to be the time Anakin really _does_ teach her a lesson; but all that happens is an understated _click_ as the locking mechanism jams.

For a moment Ahsoka glares at it, then throws out a hand and tries to wrench the internal lock open. But Anakin's stronger in the Force than she is—a lot stronger. After a few seconds of mindless wrestling in which she can't feel anything but hot fury and she's closer to _hating him_ than she's been since he threw her a knife all those years ago, she can't hold the impasse any longer. The shockwave from the built-up strain snapping physically throws her back from the door. She trips over her own feet and lands on her elbow, sending a numb shockwave down her fingers.

Anakin's footsteps approach from closer than Ahsoka had realized he was standing; he reaches down and lifts her to her feet by the back of her shirt collar while she glares at the floor. Then, ignoring her startled “ _Hey!_ ” he grabs her forearm and drags her across the room, all but throwing her back into her seat.

“I said _s_ _it down._ ” he says unnecessarily.

Ahsoka, nursing a hurt arm and wounded pride, refuses to look at him.

“So much for always looking after our people,” she mutters.

Anakin crosses his arms, and her frown intensifies. She knows what he's going to say and he's _wrong_ , Barriss _is_ hers, she chose her and that makes her Ahsoka's responsibility. Like adopting a tooka that followed her home. Or something.

“I ever tell you I got a message from Unduli?” he says instead.

That surprises Ahsoka enough that she looks up without thinking. “What? What about?”

He snorts. “The price of jogans on Tatooine. What do you _think_ it was about?” Waving off her questions, he continues, “Letting me know that my _discipline problems_ are my own business, but she didn't appreciate the disregard for her security and privacy and if it happened again she wouldn't be able to write it off as a misunderstanding.”

“I don't have a discipline problem!” says Ahsoka indignantly.

“You _are_ a discipline problem,” Anakin grumbles under his breath. Then, “Do you _understand_ what that means?”

Ahsoka crosses her arms tight against her stomach and kicks at the floor. “Unduli's got a saberstaff up her ass?” she suggests.

Anakin's jaw works angrily. “It _means_ , next time you violate her airspace she's within her rights to kill you. You think I won't retaliate if that happens? And she knows I'll lose the support of most of our Sith allies, because if _my_ apprentice starts anything that makes me the aggressor. They're bound to defend us if we're attacked, _not_ fight our feuds for us.”

“ _Aggressor?_ ” Ahsoka shakes her head sharply. “I'm not bombing the tower, Master, I just want to...”

“Oh yeah?” He doesn't look impressed. “And how are you gonna do that? You don't _think_ sometimes, Ahsoka!”

She tries to jump to her feet; Anakin shoves her back down.

“How do you expect that to end?” he demands. “You miss Barriss enough that you want to meet her on opposite sides of a bladelock when her master starts a feud and orders her to kill you?”

Ahsoka stiffens, but tries to blow it off with a scoff. “Please. Barriss wouldn't do that.”

“If you care about her as much as you claim you'd better hope she _does_ ,” Anakin growls. “That way you can kill her quickly. You know what Unduli's like. What do you think she'd do to an apprentice who disobeyed a direct order because of you? Not just a rival, an _enemy?_ ”

Ahsoka swallows, unwilling to admit he's right.

 _Please. Your master pulls out lightning if you fold your robes wrong_...

All of a sudden, with the comm silence, it's not funny anymore.

This time Anakin doesn't push the advantage. Finally Ahsoka cracks and scowls up at him.

“Then what am I supposed to _do?_ ” she demands, hating the helplessness in her voice.

Anakin shrugs, making her heart clench with how unconcerned he looks. “You might have to deal with Barriss deciding you're not worth the trouble.” That, at least, earns her a pat on the shoulder. “If she's not smart or bold enough to want you, she doesn't deserve you anyway. If she _does_ —look, it's like stalking, right? Don't roll your eyes at me, you're still in trouble. You want a hunt to be successful? You want to go home with what you came for? You wait until you have a good opportunity to strike, you don't just rush out because you got impatient.”

 _Blast_ it, he's right and Ahsoka hates him for it.

Anakin shakes his head. “I get that you miss your girlfriend, kid, but start a war with Unduli and you'll _really_ never see her again.”

“I know,” she mutters.

“That stunt you just pulled earned you two weeks on data entry.”

“Yeah, I figured.”

“If these dishes aren't washed properly you're spending a month helping in the kitchen after meals to learn how to do it right.”

“I _know_.”

Anakin pauses, and there's that hum of power just under his voice again when he says, “And Ahsoka. I've decided not to restrict you to the complex over this. But if you disobey me and give Luminara Unduli _any_ reason to move against us, she won't have to kill you, because I _swear_ I will do it myself.”

Ahsoka nearly shivers at the cold certainty under the threat—or, rather, the promise. Anakin almost never issues ultimatums and usually drops punishments once he's certain she's learned the lesson, but he _always_ keeps his promises.

“Yes, Master,” she says quietly.

He watches her for several moments before inclining his head and gesturing sharply at the table.

“Finish eating,” he orders. “Then clean this up.”

* * *

Barriss licks her lips and takes a steadying breath before leaning in for another try.

Despite her tension, it's almost a relief to have things very nearly back to normal. If not the normal she's become accustomed to over the past year, then... _a_ normal, at least. Except that her skin itches from the inside out.

It's difficult, impossible, to just...readjust to the previous baseline. She can't force herself to slip back into the comforting grey of routine again. Not when something about Ahsoka had made her feel _alive_ since only a few months after they met; the attraction had come on the heels of that, not before, whatever her master might think.

Reflexively, she glances up at Luminara in case the rebellious thought showed on her face. Her master keeps reading her datapad without even seeming to register Barriss' presence, which is a relief.

It's been over three weeks, and Barriss' exterior door is still locked.

Three days was all she'd had to endure of being confined to her bare rooms before her comlink had buzzed with a curt order from her master to begin work on Valara's journals. She'd tested the connecting door and been unsurprised to find her access to that, at least, restored. But those three days had been unbearable, doubly so because she had nothing to do but pace and worry. It had taken all of Barriss' self-control not to snap her lightsabers to life and destroy anything in sight just for some way of working out her nervous energy—but she didn't want to think about her master's reaction to such a childish display of temper.

So she'd trained against a remote as much as she could, and fretted, and eaten the dry nutrient bars and cold sandwiches the slaves had brought her twice a day, and been afraid.

She's only tried the comm system once. She'd known it would be jammed; her holonet connection is disabled as well. Her master has made it clear, without ever saying it in as many words, that if Barriss wants access to those amenities she can use them under supervision or not at all.

In a span of less than two weeks she'd been stripped of almost every privilege she'd managed to earn in ten years of devoted service. And a month later she's still too afraid to even _think_ that it isn't fair, it's not right, she didn't do anything wrong and...Force. Even the thought is stupid and short-sighted and part of her hates herself for it. Hasn't that particular weakness caused enough trouble? But it doesn't change the facts.

She wants Ahsoka. Still, after everything, she just wants Ahsoka.

Her simulation beeps, and she shakes herself.

She's being irresponsible. Careless. She shouldn't let her mind wander when she's working.

Barriss can say this for a month and a half of uninterrupted work with a metaphorical vibroblade hanging over her head: she's certainly gotten a lot done. She's actually in Stage Two of her visual model of the temple ruins, wherein having created one viable model she is feverishly attempting to create as many other possible configurations as possible. _This_ is something of a long shot, something they're trying just because it would be foolish not to.

A sliver of stone, gathered from the mysterious temple by a bounty hunter in Luminara's employ and delivered a week ago, sits on a dais in front of her; a scanner unit above it displays a readout on a screen to Barriss' right. It might be possible to tune the scanner _just right_ and find a frequency that will slip through the stone's scattering properties, but if such a frequency exists Barriss is having trouble finding it.

She winces as she turns one sensor array too far to the right and gets another error message. This requires very delicate motor skills; it would be much, much easier if she weren't so tense.

She takes another deep breath, closing her eyes this time and asking the Force to guide her. She can feel the sensors slowly shifting frequencies, can almost feel the stone start to turn transparent under her guiding fingers, _almost_ feel the breakthrough...

 _Bee-beep_.

Barriss opens her eyes to glare at the scanner; her thoughts are interrupted by a sharp sigh and the _clack_ of a datapad being abruptly set down.

“ _Barriss_.”

She shrinks back from the sound of her name—it never heralds anything good, not coming from Luminara.

“I'm s—yes, Master?”

“I expect you back by dawn. Test me, and you will regret it.”

Barriss hesitates. “I'm...Master, I don't understand.”

Luminara's exasperation leaks into the Force. “This is the fifth time in as many minutes that you have failed to align that device properly.”

“I'm sorry, Master.” Barriss wrings her hands together. “It's...a process...”

“A process that would go far smoother if you focused on your work for more than thirty seconds at a time.”

Barriss cringes. Her master is, as usual, more perceptive than she had appeared. “I'm sorry—”

Luminara makes an impatient gesture. “ _Enough_ of your apologies, girl. I've no use for you in this condition. If you are so incapable of controlling yourself, go find your pet Togruta and have her do it for you.”

Barriss stares at her.

“Are you _deaf_ , apprentice?”

Barriss leaps to her feet. “No, Master!” she exclaims hastily. “I...mean—yes, Master. Thank you, Master.”

“ _Out_ ,” Luminara snaps.

Barriss bows deeply and scrambles backwards out the door before her master has time to change her mind.

* * *

That the passkey still works is both a relief and cause for concern.

Barriss hasn't looked at it since she was first confined to her rooms—she hasn't dared, for fear of drawing attention to it and having it confiscated. She had very nearly disintegrated it to be safe; she would never have forgiven herself if her master _had_ acted on her anger, and realized she had a security chip to Skywalker's operation under her roof. She'd just hoped it wouldn't receive remote security updates—a hope she now realizes was in vain.

But hope, sentiment, weakness, call it what you will, hasn't let her destroy the key. She's grateful she has it now, because if she was confronted even by Grapes the night guard she knows she would lose her nerve. She's already run three diagnostics and manually gone over the entire shuttle with a hand scanner just in case Luminara's rigged it to explode.

Eventually, she forces herself to exit the shuttle. Most of the lights are off in Ahsoka's apartment; the corridor is longer than Barriss remembers and yet so short that when she finds herself standing in front of the door she regrets not walking slower.

If she waits until she's ready, she'll wait all night. The door's unlocked; a shaky tap to the control pad sends it sliding open.

Ahsoka is not asleep or in the 'fresher as Barriss had half been hoping, or gone from her quarters entirely as she'd feared. She's sprawled on her stomach in loose-fitting sleepwear, feet kicking lazily in the air as she pokes at a datapad. She glances up as Barriss forces herself to step over the threshold, and her eyes flash.

Barriss swallows.

“Ahsoka,” she whispers by way of greeting.

After a long pause, Ahsoka sits up slowly. She tosses the datapad onto the mattress behind her as she stands, without once looking away from Barriss. She doesn't respond, and Barriss finds herself unable to speak again. Not with those icy eyes, streaked with just the hint of gold, pinning her heart in her throat.

Ahsoka takes a deliberate step to her left; Barriss mirrors her without thinking, and a thrill races down her spine at the satisfaction in Ahsoka's eyes at the motion. There's no warmth in it this time, no playfulness, no lopsided grin. Nothing but cold, coiled anger.

This, she realizes, is what it _really_ means to be stalked by a predator.

Ahsoka takes her time, backing Barriss up like she could spend all night doing it; and then closing the distance even more languidly than that, bracing the heel of her palm on Barriss' sternum and pressing her all the way against the wall. For a moment she just _stares_.

“What do you want?” she asks flatly.

And there are a thousand things Barriss _wants_ —she wants to feel safe, wants to feel _wanted_ , wants the warmth of Ahsoka's arms holding her just a little too close; she wants Ahsoka to make one of the wry comments that have always made her laugh, run fingers through her hair, but everything she could ask for is a superficial detail.

“I...” she says weakly; and then, “You.”

Before she has time to react to the motion Ahsoka grips her shoulder and pulls, grabs Barriss' saber arm and twists it behind her back as she pins her face-first against the wall. Barriss just manages to gasp before her wrist is wrenched higher in a bruising grip. It hurts just enough, as a warm body presses up against her back.

“You sure about that?” Ahsoka growls beside her ear.

It takes a long moment for Barriss to force herself to respond, rather than trying pathetically to nuzzle as close to Ahsoka as she can get.

“Yes,” she mumbles finally. “Yes, anything, please, _please_...”

She quickly loses track of what she's saying, but Ahsoka doesn't stop touching her, so she doesn't much care.

* * *

Ahsoka pauses, glances up, and smiles.

 _Poor little thing_ , she thinks with a slight smirk, resting her cheek against Barriss' knee as she watches her stir weakly. _Wore her out_.

Well, too bad. Ahsoka's not quite done with her.

The smirk widens as she trails light kisses down the inside of Barriss' thigh, tracing the line of darkening bruises from earlier, and—just like she'd known would happen—Barriss groans softly and shifts to give her better access.

It's almost an anticlimax after the way the night's gone. There had just been a primal, fundamental _satisfaction_ in dragging this girl against her, reclaiming her territory. In having Barriss sprawled over her prize bantha pelt, tracks of fingernails already scoring her flanks, spread out and panting, desperate, silently _begging_ to be taken. It's hard to match that kind of intoxication. Ahsoka had almost _tasted_ wood smoke and grass in the scent of her trophy kill on Barriss' skin, and under the frantic sobs of her name there had very nearly been hunting drums pounding...

But the bed _is_ much more comfortable. Even Ahsoka can acknowledge that.

Barriss is spent and exhausted, so—this one time—Ahsoka doesn't tease her. She's done enough of that tonight anyway. Long, even strokes of her tongue, the scrape of teeth at just the right pressure... She digs in with her fingernails to hold Barriss' hips down as they try to rise off the mattress and sucks _hard_ , until Barriss stops shaking under her.

Ahsoka's head ducks again to work her through the aftershocks. Eventually Barriss' fingers drift down and push weakly and her montrals; she lets herself be guided up, presses a kiss to the trembling olive-green fingers, and sits up to crack her back before flopping down on her side of the bed. She grabs a bottle of water off her side table, takes a long drink, then pauses and hands it over to Barriss. After a pause while Barriss tries to focus on the strange object being dangled in front of her eyes, she takes it gratefully.

They're silent for a long time, even once Barriss stops gasping for breath; Ahsoka almost thinks she's asleep until she glances over and finds Barriss idly turning the empty water bottle over in her hands. Ahsoka smiles faintly and closes her eyes until she has the energy to speak.

“You've got some nerve,” she informs the ceiling. “You know that?”

Barriss turns her head, frowning, and Ahsoka glances to the side and raises an eyebrow at her.

“Refuse to talk to me for six weeks and then show up at my door just _assuming_ I'll take you back?”

As an argument, it has merit. Or would, if she'd made it _before_ shoving Barriss up against every flat surface in the room.

Barriss gives the complaint the dignity it deserves, the corner of her mouth twitching as she rolls her eyes.

“Well,” she says quietly. “I can't imagine you found it _that_ difficult to find someone willing to keep you company.”

For a moment Ahsoka feels hurt without quite knowing why. Swallowing the feeling, she looks over at Barriss and smirks.

“Please.” She runs the backs of her fingers down Barriss' arm, catches a nipple between two knuckles, and tugs lightly. “I don't settle for _anything_ but what I want.”

For a moment Barriss' face is entirely blank; then she blinks rapidly, swallows, and looks back at the ceiling. The empty water bottle twists in her hands. “I...” She cuts herself off quickly. After a long pause, she hesitates and says “I would have come if I could.”

“Let me guess. You were _busy_.”

“If by that you mean in disgrace, yes.” Ahsoka raises an eyebrow; Barriss has as quick a temper as any Sith whatever she likes to pretend but the snap is still unexpected. “I _said_ I would have come if I could. Not everyone can court punishment as recklessly as you seem to relish in.”

Ahsoka frowns slightly at the mention of punishment. It's not like Anakin's _never_ restricted her to the complex, and it's not like she doesn't know he's an outlier in his dislike of torture for use on his underlings. Masters have the right and the responsibility to keep their apprentices in line. But keeping someone like _Barriss_ in line should take a light breeze, not...

“If my master did that to me,” she says, “I'd kill him.”

Barriss, defensive anger past, snorts under her breath.

“Yes,” she says dryly. “I'm certain you would _try_.”

Ahsoka rolls onto her side, propping herself up on one elbow. “I mean it. You're a hundred times the apprentice I am, but you don't see Anakin torturing me just for wanting you. When are you gonna kill her?”

Barriss shoots her a reproachful look. “That isn't funny.”

“No,” Ahsoka snaps. “It really _isn't_.” Barriss rolls her eyes, and Ahsoka growls and rolls over, throwing an arm around Barriss' waist and tugging her under her. “What are you waiting for? She doesn't deserve you.”

Barriss shoves her arm away irritably. “She's my master.”

Ahsoka's eyes narrow, but she doesn't snarl the way she wants to. Instead she twirls a lock of hair around one finger, lets it fall again, tucks it behind Barriss' ear as she runs slow fingers through her hair. She watches her intently; Barriss finally makes eye contact but immediately drops it again.

“There's Sith lords who are scared of you, you know,” Ahsoka says abruptly.

Barriss blinks. “I'm sorry?”

“It's true. With the network and information system Unduli's built up, you think people haven't taken her on yet because they're not _interested?_ I've heard people say the tower's the next best thing to the Temple. The only reason they haven't moved against her is because of _you_.”

Barriss hugs herself, still refusing to look at Ahsoka. “That's ridiculous.”

“You're her security! You're the most brutally efficient duelist I've ever seen. There's plenty of Sith who could take Unduli one-on-one, how many apprentices are there in the galaxy who could take _you?_ Especially knowing you'd have her as backup?” She tightens her grip in Barriss' hair, just enough to finally make her look up. “Unduli's gone unchallenged this long  _because of you._ ”

“Good.” Barriss stares determinedly at Ahsoka's elbow. “My master devoted time and resources to training me, she could have taken a stronger and more talented apprentice but she raised me from nothing instead. I _should_ do her credit in my reputation... _What?_ Why are you _looking_ at me like that?”

Very slowly, swallowing back all the choice words boiling in her chest, Ahsoka leans down and kisses her softly.

“You're the kind of apprentice Sith across the galaxy _dream_ of finding,” she says. The words are fierce, but the kisses she trails along Barriss' cheek are tender. “And she knows it. The only person who doesn't see how lucky she got is you. She _needs_ you.” Ahsoka can't keep a low growl out of her voice as she adds, “She needs you a _lot_ more than you need her.” Barriss stiffens but doesn't say anything, and Ahsoka holds her close to whisper in her ear.

“You could do it,” she breathes. “ _You could take her._ ”

The spell breaks as Barriss turns her head, pushing Ahsoka away. “I don't want to talk about this.”

“Yeah?” Ahsoka pushes herself up, straddling Barriss' hips and pinning her shoulders to the mattress. “Too bad. _I'm tired of watching you go back to Unduli_.”

“Ahsoka,” Barriss pleads. “I—I don't want to talk about it, please just—just let this be enough, there's a precedent now, she'll let me see you still if I behave, if she knew I let you say things like this she'd never let me see you again, please, Ahsoka!”

“That's what I'm talking about! What gives _her_ the right to tell you what you're allowed to feel?”

“She's my master,” Barriss insists. “If she thinks you're a distraction—she's allowed to—she has the right to my time, she has the right to punish me if I—displease her—Ahsoka, I'm sorry, I'm not like you, I can't—she has the right, she's my _master_ —”

“She's got responsibilities too!” Ahsoka exclaims. “She's supposed to be growing your power, building you up in the Force, not tearing you down and refusing to even teach you anything that she can't turn around and use as a tool. How is torturing you for not wearing matching socks building you into a powerful Sith? If she's not holding up her end of the deal, you don't have to hold up yours.”

It's immediately clear that nothing she's saying is getting through.

“You want me to kill my master.” Barriss says, and a mixture of fury and terror wars in her eyes. “You would, wouldn't you? She's the only real rival in this sector. _You_ —does your master know about this? You always were so _resourceful_ , weren't you? I should have realized, I never should have trusted you! You've been planning this from the beginning!”

Ahsoka gives a rippling snarl. “Shut up. What do I want Unduli dead for? The last thing we need is a power vacuum! Anakin's interests barely cross with hers at all. Someone else moving in would be the worst thing for us. And if _that's_ what you think of me the door's right there!”

Barriss is beyond hearing.

“This is a test,” she babbles, shaking her head. The anguish is winning out over righteous anger. “This is a test, she _told_ you to do this, I _knew_ it was too easy—well you can tell her I passed it, I won't move against her, I'm not, I won't, I've never plotted against her, I'm loyal, I've always been loyal to her, I'm grateful for everything she's—let me _go_ , I _won't_ —”

Ahsoka grabs her wrists as much as to stop her from hurting herself as to hold her still; for a moment Barriss thrashes wildly against her, but it's not long before her panic dissolves into wracking, broken sobs.

“Shh,” Ahsoka whispers, because she has no idea what else to say. After a moment she releases Barriss' arms. They fall bonelessly across her chest as she cries. “Look, I'm sorry. I don't...like slavers, okay? You're better than she says you are, you deserve better...”

The storm passes slowly, but eventually, it does start to pass. Barriss turns her face away, frantically wiping away tears she clearly doesn't want to admit she's still shedding, and one of Ahsoka's lekku almost pokes her in the eye as it dangles between them. Without thinking, Ahsoka catches it in one hand and tosses it back over her shoulder.

And Barriss flinches.

Ahsoka instantly goes still. It takes several moments for her to even understand what happened or what had caused Barriss to cringe into the mattress; when she finally figures it out, she lowers the hand she'd raised as slowly as she can, running her knuckles softly along Barriss' cheek until she opens her eyes and realizes Ahsoka isn't going to hit her.

“If that's the kind of reflex she's teaching you,” Ahsoka rasps, “You're _not_ her apprentice. She should have bought a slave if she wanted one.”

“Don't,” Barriss whispers.

Ahsoka gently takes her wrists in hand again, holding them against the mattress on either side of Barriss' face.

“Tell me she respects you.”

Barriss closes her eyes and says nothing.

“Say it. Tell me she treats you right and I'll never say another word about it. Tell me you like being her apprentice. That's all you have to say.”

Barriss takes a deep, shuddering breath. “She'll kill me, Ahsoka.”

“Tell me you don't want her dead.”

A long, miserable silence. Finally, Barriss tugs at Ahsoka's grip on her wrist, and Ahsoka lets her go.

She half expects Barriss to grab her clothes and leave, but the little Mirialan just rolls over and curls into a ball. Carefully, so as not to scare her, Ahsoka lays down next to her and pulls a fresh blanket over them both.

“What time do you have to be back?”

Silence. Then, faintly, “Before dawn.”

Ahsoka winces and glances at her chrono. For the first time she regrets keeping Barriss up so long.

“I'll wake you up in a few hours,” she says.

Barriss relaxes back into her arms, and for a moment she's dizzy with relief. She'd come so close to ruining everything.

She holds Barriss close. For a long time, they're both quiet.

“Do you think I haven't considered it?” Barriss finally whispers. She doesn't lift her head, but doesn't protest Ahsoka's arm around her either. “I can't. I can't. She's more powerful than I am. It's not enough wanting her dead. If I fail...”

Ahsoka feels cold at the very thought. And yet.

“If you _succeed_ ,” she counters.

Barriss shivers. Ahsoka tightens her hold instinctively, and after a moment Barriss leans back to look up at her, deep blue eyes pleading.

“You make it sound so simple.” She offers up a weak smile.

Ahsoka leans down and rests their foreheads together. “You don't have to do it tomorrow,” she points out. “Let me help. If I can.” She makes a face. “Anakin said I can't start anything with Unduli, but he never said I couldn't train with _you_. I mean...if there's anything I can do. And if you, you know. Want to.”

Barriss bites her lip.

“There's something you'd need to teach me,” she whispers.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the record: While Barriss and Ahsoka have as close to a healthy relationship as possible, Sith relationships of any sort are kind of inherently unhealthy. In real life, if someone is not ready to leave their abuser, holding them down and yelling at them until they agree is not an appropriate response. This has been a PSA. You may now return to your regularly-scheduled guilt-free sin.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hoo boy you would not BELIEVE the trouble this chapter gave me! Glad to be back in the groove.

Ahsoka crosses her arms and glares.

“I wasn't asking,” she growls.

Effer Vistor snorts and swings his lightsaber idly in her direction. She doesn't move. “You can't give me orders, Tano. Your master's not that powerful.”

Ahsoka grips her primary hilt. “You want to put that in writing?”

Vistor glares at her for a moment, then shakes his head sharply. “Forget it! I don't take orders from you.”

“I just need an alibi! What do you care? You can...I don't know, flex in a mirror or something! Just stay out of sight for half an hour and tell people we were sparring if they ask!”

“Why me?” he demands. “Thought you didn't _like_ me getting near your little—”

“Watch it,” Ahsoka warns him.

“ _Girlfriend_ ,” he says condescendingly. “What, does she like it when you get creative?”

Ahsoka snaps her shoto live and takes three hard strides toward him before she's even thought about it. He swings his saber—standard single, with a longer blade than usual for blunt power, how predictable can you _get_ —into a ready position; Ahsoka pulls her primary up and steps back into a bristling guard before remembering that she _needs_ Vistor.

Well. She needs someone _like_ him. Uncreative, easy to manipulate, and completely expendable. But he's the most convenient.

“What do you want?” she demands irritably, watching him for an ill-advised attack. He doesn't make one—maybe he's not totally kept around for his looks after all. “Look, I'll say you disarmed me in one of our sparring matches.”

“Two out of five,” he counters. “Or you throw a supervised match.”

Ahsoka scoffs. “Don't try to haggle with me, my master's from Tatooine.”

“No deal.” His lekku twitch. “You like training rooms, huh? You know, I bet Unduli'd be pretty interested to know you're trying to go off in secret like this...”

“Your word against mine and influence wins,” Ahsoka reminds him with a smirk. She'd been annoyed but not surprised that Vistor's accurately guessed what she needs an alibi for, but as long as she doesn't confirm it she's pretty safe. Never thought she'd see the day when she was actually protected by Luminara's opinion of her, but Unduli has to share a planet with Anakin. Vistor's nothing here. “Plus _I'll gut you_ _slowly_ _and make you watch_.”

Vistor wisely takes a step back. “What if I don't want to get involved? I'm Sith, I've got as much right to my own affairs as you, I don't have to—”

Ahsoka doesn't have time for this. “Do it and I'll get my master to stop raiding your transports for six months.”

“Done.”

* * *

“Ow. _Ow_...”

Barriss cringes as the other girl clutches her montrals. “Ahsoka? I'm so sorry, I thought you would block—!”

Ahsoka takes a deep breath and rolls over, pulling herself back onto her feet by leaning against the wall Barriss threw her into. Her apologies are waved off with a pained smile.

“Can't block 'em all,” she says cheerfully, even as she winces. “Wouldn't be able to tell if you're improving. _Ow_.”

“Are you all right?” Barriss asks anxiously.

Ahsoka glances at her chrono. They never risk spending more than half an hour on these little clandestine training sessions; any longer than that would be remarked on by _someone_. They'll need to stop in about five minutes so Barriss can duck into the 'fresher, slap bacta on any visible injuries, jump in a sonic for a few minutes and switch her training gear for the clothes she came to the Temple wearing.

“Yeah,” Ahsoka assures her. “Don't worry, I'll be—”

Without warning, she flings a hand out and throws a branching bolt of raw power at Barriss' face.

It's close, very close, closer than she likes to think about; but Barriss ignites her blade and swing it into a block half a heartbeat before the lightning reaches her. She takes half a step back to brace herself, but manages the block. Ahsoka can only hold the lightning for a few moments, but if Barriss knows the move she knows the move. She'll hold as long as she needs to if it comes to it.

In theory.

“Hopefully you won't need to know any of this,” Ahsoka points out. “Do it fast and don't mess around. Anakin says your opponent's not as good as dead until they _are_ dead. He doesn't even like me gloating over slavers, and that's just for fun.”

“Yes.” Barriss hooks her saber hilt onto her belt. “I know.”

“Okay. Just...be fast, be ready, and don't freeze. You know what you're doing.” Ahsoka rolls her shoulders anxiously. “And...I mean, we can keep training as long as you like, there's no hurry, we can take as much time as you want...”

They can't. They really can't. These training sessions are all but impossible to keep truly secret; they've been almost neurotically careful, Ahsoka's even been arriving using public transports and walking the last block and a half, but Luminara will suspect soon. More than that, both of them can _sense_ the balance tipping. Barriss has learned everything she can from Ahsoka's less than perfect teaching; either she'll use it when the opportunity arises, or she'll never have a chance. The moment she sees her opening and chooses not to take it, her master will _know_. Apprentices can never keep this kind of plotting a secret for long.

But there's still more than enough time to improve. She knows the theory, now. It's just a matter of confidence-building, developing muscle memory. Another few months and, maybe, they can begin to plan in earnest. Not yet. Not yet. But soon.

“All right, um...” Ahsoka checks the time again. “Really quick. When can we meet up again?”

Barriss runs the calendar in her head. “Three weeks,” she decides. “If all goes well.”

The temple project is effectively completed; today is set aside for final checks. By this time tomorrow they'll be en route to Ziost. Assuming they survive—which they will, Barriss is certain of that, she couldn't have prepared better, all the traps are marked and they have the Force to guide them—there will be a flurry of activity when they return. Easier to justify visiting the Temple, but she'll have enough legitimate work that slipping away from it will be harder.

Ahsoka bounces on the soles of her feet. “You're getting better,” she points out. “I don't know how much longer you'll need to train.”

“A little longer yet, I think.” Barriss wishes her smile was less nervous. It's...so easy, _too_ easy, to feel confident and steady with Ahsoka close enough to touch, but Ahsoka underestimates her master. She can't move against Luminara until she's sure. Until she's certain. Anything less than that level of skill, and she's dead already.

For her part, Ahsoka has shown less eagerness than Barriss expected; it seems that for both of them, the reality of how dangerous even the mere suggestion of this kind of mutiny is for their kind is impossible to escape. Ahsoka's caution, oddly, makes Barriss feel more confident. Ahsoka doesn't want to lose her, she wouldn't urge her into a fight she isn't ready for. It reinforces her determination: there's no need to plan or be nervous, not until it's time to move. Not until she's _sure_. She has too much to lose.

Someday.

“I should go,” she says quietly. “Someone will notice I'm missing.”

Ahsoka scuffs her toe against the floor. “Yeah. Well...three weeks, then. I've got this cool disarming trick I wanted to show you. I mean, you probably already know it so it might be a waste of time, but...”

Impulsively, Barriss takes Ahsoka's face between her hands and kisses her.

“We have all the time in the galaxy,” she promises. A harder kiss, and Ahsoka's hand comes up to clutch at the back of Barriss' neck, holding her close.

“You'll be fine,” she says after a long moment. “Just keep your head down until it's time. I'll see you in three weeks.”

* * *

She's very nearly late.

Barriss is poring anxiously over her scratchpad for the nth time when she rubs her face and happens to glance at the chrono. Hissing a series of creative curses, she scrambles to pull her notes together and all but dives out the door.

If she's failed to find any sign that her models are inaccurate by now, a few more minutes worrying about it isn't going to help.

It's also too late to run inventory on her notes as she runs downstairs, but it doesn't stop her doing it. She's had to be very careful in what she chooses to bring, but some things can't be left behind. She touches her scratchpad three times on the way to the hangar bay to make sure it's there; it may very well be her most valuable possession in the hours to come.

Both she and her master have holoprojectors containing the 3D models of Barriss' reconstruction and the original floor plan, but Barriss is unwilling to place all her faith in an electronic system while in the heart of a temple where the very walls cause scanners to malfunction. She has flimsi-print diagrams of the temple models tucked into the notebook; she's copied over every word of Linth's ramblings in case something happens once they're inside the temple that gives sense to them, written out Sedeya's exact phrasing in descriptions of several traps for the same reason; several of the flimsi sheets bound neurotically into her scratchbook are the few surviving scans of the original, kept because some marking or sketch caught Barriss' attention.

She's _certain_ it isn't enough. But it's not as if she has much of a choice in the matter. She'd had to give in and dose herself with sleep medication last night or she would be making this trip to Ziost utterly exhausted from worrying.

She forces herself to stop just outside the hangar bay and walk in calmly, but she's still out of breath when she slips into the pilot's seat and begins running flight checks.

Luminara glances from Barriss to the chronometer and raises an eyebrow slightly, but doesn't comment.

“Thank you for your patience, Master,” Barriss says calmly anyway. Sometimes polite thanks are less dangerous than an apology, if Luminara doesn't already think she's done something wrong. “I wanted to run a final check of my notes.”

The look her master throws her is sharper this time. “That should have been done long before you retired last night.”

“It was!” Barriss protests, hastily lowering her voice and her head when Luminara's eyebrows go up at her tone. “I did. I went over them more times than I can count, Master.”

She can feel Luminara's cool gaze on her as she feeds the temple coordinates into the navicomputer, seals and pressurizes the cabin, and brings repulsors online.

“I would be extremely displeased, Barriss,” her master finally says, “if I allowed you this level of responsibility to find I had been mislead as to your ability to live up to it.”

Barriss stiffens, fingers tightening around the controls. The boiling resentment at Luminara's suspicion surprises her with its intensity; it takes several seconds before she's able to choke it down enough that it doesn't show in her voice.

“I was just anxious, Master,” she says carefully. “I would rather be overly cautious than careless.”

“Naturally.” Luminara's voice is still dangerously soft; Barriss has to fight to keep her fingers from trembling as she flicks the shuttle's wing flaps into takeoff position. After a long pause, her master's eyes slide off Barriss and her attention shifts to a display screen.

Barriss lets out the breath she hadn't realized she was holding, and nudges the shuttle out of the landing bay in silence.

* * *

A thick vine catches on the loading ramp of the shuttle as her master closes it with a gesture; tough, inedible groundcover plants like it are the only things that can survive in this kind of tundra. Barriss sidesteps a moment before the vine un-snags and snaps back into position. Its three-inch thorns leave indentations in the soil where she had been standing.

Lovely planet, Ziost.

Barriss shivers; it has less to do with the cold than the crumbling silver-gray ruins a few hundred meters away. The pile of rubble is the only thing not covered in choking black thorns for miles in any direction.

She can understand the local flora's reluctance. The Dark Side pulses and eddies around the ruins, alive and sentient in the way of any location so steeped in history and the Force; she can even feel her master taking a moment to breathe in the sensation. Barriss lets it pulse through her as well—it's not as if she could block it even if she wanted to—and her breath stutters.

It's...well, it feels _cold_ , malicious and malevolent to a much higher degree than anywhere she's been before. Most Sith ruins resonate with chilling hatred, but Barriss has never met one that didn't have a sort of clinical curiosity under it as well; ancient temples like this test you, trick you, ask you to prove yourself and want you to fail. The oldest of them _ensure_ it, convinced no mortal can even hope to be worthy of their secrets. This one feels different, more dangerous. It's not interested in guarding its secrets or testing those who would plunder them; it doesn't even radiate hatred like some of the nastier ones.

The Force has no edge of sadism here, no disdain, no emotion at all. Not even more than an afterthought of _pain_. It's quiet, dark and cold not like cruelty soaked into the walls of a dungeon but in the way the deepest trenches of an ocean are dark and cold.

 _Survive_ , it whispers without words, in the voice of the most ancient and unthinkable creatures in all of time. _Your_ _reward is survival._

“Barriss.” Luminara's voice cuts through her reverie. “Keep up.”

Barriss is only vaguely aware of following her master to the edge of the ruins. Her work with the reconstructions lets her find the tiny diagonal gap between two massive slabs of stone as if in her sleep; normally, that would be a relief. She braces herself on the slick weather-worn surface and lets herself slide along the stone, barely managing to stop herself before she shoots off the end. Barriss takes the five-foot drop cautiously, moving out of the way as her master follows her.

Without warning, the cold blackness of the temple rushes against her ears, blacking out her vision, filling her mouth and nose. It feels like being trapped under an icy flood, but the pressure is greater than any water she's ever experienced, almost solid, choking her—

“ _Barriss!_ ”

Luminara's voice snaps through the smothering darkness like a whip. Barriss instinctively gulps for air; and the pressure is gone like it never existed, leaving her panting and blinking rapidly at a narrow gap between a crumbling wall and a collapsed pillar. Faded symbols on the wall to her left glow faintly red in the light from her master's saber blade.

“I'm sorry, Master,” she gasps.

The Force shifts at her back and gives a soundless hiss of dismissal.

Luminara watches her closely for several long moments, eyes sharp; she glances at the scratchpad Barriss is carrying before inclining her head toward the gap.

Barriss hesitates at the mouth of the gap, afraid to touch the smooth stone in order to squeeze past it; only a flare of impatience from her master urges her forward. There's no suffocating surge in the Force this time. The stone is cold, covered in dirt, and dead.

But she can still feel that indifferent chill, circling languidly just at the edges of her awareness.

The safest-looking path, once she slips past the chunk of masonry, is a low drop and then slants down to the left. She's not certain of the nature of the trap a few meters along that route, but she suspects it's a natural hallucinogen of some sort. Either that, or there really _is_ a swarm of Felucian acid-ants somehow surviving down there, which is all the more reason to stay away.

She grasps a bit of crown molding, braces her foot against the wall, and swings her body around to pulls herself up and onto what looks like it was once a floor. They shouldn't be that far below the surface right now, but the air is already heavy—thick with dust and the weight of the stone above their heads. Already she can no longer hear the wind; the cobwebs in a corner are unmoving in the still air.

They continue to hang limp as a freezing gust of wind strikes Barriss in the face. The shock makes her gasp, earning her another strange look from her master as they pick their way across the unstable footing. The coiling sensation of the Force around her is tinged with disgust that Luminara doesn't seem to feel.

 _What are you waiting for?_ the darkness hisses.

More than slightly disturbed, Barriss shoves the whispers away and turns the Force to _her_ will, snapping a trigger line hidden deep in the wall with a gesture. Somewhere in the distance she hears a series of noises that sound like very large pieces of metal embedding themselves in stone.

“Be wary of the temple's structural integrity,” Luminara says behind her. There's no real admonishment in her voice, but the Force curls around Barriss like a deep-ocean eel, pulsing with anticipation.

 _Stop that_ , she thinks irritably, brushing herself down unnecessarily in an attempt to banish the sensation. The cold impatience clings to her anyway as she climbs down another drop, following her master. Luminara seems to be following some sense in the Force that Barriss, overwhelmed by the sluggish heartbeat of the ruins in her ears, can't make out.

The black whispers surrounding her surge again; not at Barriss this time, but around her. Once again she's reminded of primitive sea creatures in the abyss. The Force here cares nothing for rank or power, intent or emotion. It's circling. Hunting. _Waiting_.

 _Survive_ , it whispers. _The weak have no place here. If you will not hunt, you will be prey._

_And it will be your own fault._

The idea of pity is laughable. A predator that shrinks from the hunt deserves what she gets.

 _When I'm ready_ , she tells it. If Luminara, scarcely a meter ahead of her, close enough to touch, hears the rebellious thought, she gives no indication of it.

The temple is more observant. As far as it is concerned, the little fish has shown her weakness.

A thrash and twist in the darkness, and the Force lunges again, pressing on Barriss' senses from all sides, threatening to overwhelm her, muffling her ears and lungs with shadow made liquid. Before she has a chance to choke again she throws her mind out with all the strength she can manage, fueling it with fear and adrenaline as she flings her nonexistent attacker away.

A stone pillar to her left cracks ominously. Luminara turns from examining a series of engravings on a half-collapsed frieze with fire in her eyes.

“ _Control yourself_ , apprentice,” she snaps. The shadows circling Barriss' mind undulate as they wait for her to flinch again.

Is her master _blind?_ The Force is writhing around them and she sees nothing but an academic mystery, and yet she speaks as if Barriss is the one with no grasp of their surroundings—as if it isn't Barriss who knows this temple, who's always done the information-gathering—as if her part in this could have been done by anyone, as if the idea of, oh, Ahsoka, being able to hold a candle to her research skills isn't a _joke_ —

“Yes, Master,” she says, holding her sudden flare of anger behind her teeth. Luminara looks at her, a warning in her eyes, for several seconds; then she gives an exasperated noise and jerks her head, summoning Barriss in her wake.

The darkness roils, scenting blood, and hisses again as Barriss pads down a surviving corridor after her master.

It's growing impatient with her. She will be hunter or hunted, and it wants her to get on with deciding. It doesn't much care which she chooses; she isn't interesting enough.

 _Are you waiting for a sign?_ The cold, disjointed pulsing at her temples begins to speed up as she tries to ignore the way the Force presses at her. The universe doesn't care about her, it hisses. _You are nothing here._

Dimly, she's aware of the sound of her footsteps changing; the tiles they're walking on now are rich enamel, cracked and worn by time. They must be near the ruins of the ballroom, then.

A hard lash at her shields punishes her for losing focus. _Fight your battles or be destroyed. Survival is all the reward you earn by surviving._ _Even prey fights._

Barriss is far past being able to form words. _I'm...not prey..._

 _Prey,_ comes the answering whisper. _If you will not hunt, then you exist to serve those who will._ _You deserve nothing you will not demand_.

Ahsoka's eyes, burning and fierce. _You deserve better_.

The image is vague. There is no compassion in the abyss. Love is nowhere near ancient enough to mean anything here.

 _Nothing is deserved._ The shadows pound and press against her, waiting for that final, fatal sign of weakness. _None are worthy of a thing they will not claim._

It occurs to her that throughout her silent battle, despite the dull pulse of the Force against every part of her, her own heart has been beating hot and fast, stronger than the outside force trying to destroy her.

She almost expects the darkness to be furious at the suggestion—but where weakness cannot survive, arrogance has no place. If she is to be the predator, so be it, if she will _prove_ it.

 _You deserve nothing here. Fairness is for mortals_.

But she _is_ mortal...

_Then demand it. Nothing is given. Everything is earned._

She can remember nothing but this moment—burning, defiant, stronger than she's ever been, all pretense stripped away. Her fingers brush her primary saber hilt and the crystal nearly sings.

 _Survive._ _It makes no difference. If you do not choose one you choose the other._ _Survive or die_.

This is insane.

 _I'm not ready._ She clings to it—she has to, if she challenges Luminara now—she's not _ready_.

The ancient blackness pauses its tightening curl, then recedes, its interest in her passed. The galaxy is teeming with prey-creatures.

 _And you never will be_ , it breathes as it slips away.

The pressure fades from her skull, and leaves her once more able to breathe. Able to think.

The lightsaber blazes to life in a blur of scarlet as Barriss lunges for her master's unprotected back.

 

 


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The grand finale, or: In Which Shit Goes Down.
> 
> When will my pagebreak button return from war.

  
Luminara moves faster than Barriss has seen in her life; the edge of her cloak is still singed as she twists away from Barriss' lightsaber, calling her own and forcing her apprentice's blade aside. It embeds itself in the wall with a shower of sparks and the angry hiss of melting stone.

“Barriss!” With her mind finally clear, Barriss can sense her master's shock; it's already fading, replaced by mild annoyance. “ _Control_ , girl. The call of the Dark Side is strong here, but I expect better mental discipline from you of all people.”

Barriss could almost laugh at how predictable it is—of _course_ , submissive little Barriss could never _dream_ of having a legitimate reason to raise a blade against her master. She's not foolish enough to indulge in it; she ignites her secondary blade and sends it whistling toward Luminara's saber arm. Her master wisely disengages to block, irritation spiking loudly in the Force.

“Calm yourself,” she orders sharply. “The Force is not so strong here that you should take leave of your senses.”

Barriss' lip curls as she brings up her guard and starts searching for an opening. “I haven't, Master.”

Luminara's eyebrows raise, the irritation vanishing as amusement blossoms in its place. The corner of her mouth twitches slightly as she realizes that Barriss is completely lucid.

“So I see.” Her left hand falls open casually, almost lazily, and lightning leaps for Barriss' throat.

Barriss twitches her saber blade and blocks it.

When she'd trained for this, she had always had that nagging doubt in the back of her mind; Ahsoka's grasp of lightning is largely theoretical, exhausts her too much to hold more than a weak flicker for any length of time and leaves her so drained afterward that it's not a viable combat technique. Luminara's use of the technique is, to say the least, more nuanced. Barriss has never trained against overwhelming, sustained _power_ like this.

She barely notices the strain. She fights down a wild laugh only because she doesn't dare lose focus.

She's never, not once in her life, been able to lift a finger to stop Luminara from punishing her. And she _never_ intends to tolerate it again.

She could swear her master's eyes narrow in time to a low pulse of fury; when Luminara swipes her hand to the side and breaks the flow of lightning a moment later her expression and her presence in the Force are both neutral. Barriss isn't certain whether she imagined it or not.

“So.” Luminara steps back into an easy guard position; Barriss can still sense her in the Force, faintly amused more than anything. “You have a spine after all.”

“Despite your best efforts.”

“ _Watch your tongue, girl_.” Luminara steps back to mirror her as she advances, and Barriss feels a rush of hot, burning satisfaction. “Short-sighted as ever. I cannot imagine what you hope to accomplish.”

Barriss moves cautiously forward; they _had_ been near the ballroom, she thinks in the back of her mind as she edges out of the tunnel. It's a wide, open space littered with debris but flatter and more stable than anything they've encountered so far. The ceiling—well, a collapsed portion of the next level's floor that's fallen across this half of the former ballroom—slopes dramatically; vanishing into the darkness at one end and touching the floor at the other. The only light is from the three lightsabers edging into the room, and the darkness is hungry.

A misstep; Barriss strikes at the opening. Her master blocks it, slashes at Barriss' chest to force her back again.

“That is _enough_ ,” she snaps. “I've tolerated this foolishness as far as I am willing, apprentice. Put your weapons down, _now_ , and we'll say no more about it.”

This time Barriss can't help a low, mirthless laugh. “I've never been as stupid as you said I was, Master.”

She doesn't wait for a response. Twin scarlet blades sweep in from the side with all of her weight behind the blow, jarring her arms when it connects with her master's block.

She doesn't try to power through it, spinning away and dropping low; one blade slashes at Luminara's shins; she leaps and the follow-through from Barriss' secondary turns into a block that just barely stops her from being cut from ribs to shoulder across her back. She's on her feet before Luminara can turn, but the Force throw comes before she's ready for it.

She slams into the wall hard enough to knock the air from her lungs; her secondary blade comes up in a clumsy guard, but an attack doesn't follow. Luminara is just... _watching_ her.

“Your pet put you up to this, of course,” she says, quiet voice carrying easily across the chamber.

Barriss flexes her grip on her saber hilts. “She didn't have to.”

“Really.”

Barriss hisses, dark, primal _hatred_ allowed to uncoil in her belly for the first time she can remember. The cold sentience of the temple is still circling, watching; it stirs in response and her blood _sings_.

“Do you think,” she says, low and dangerous, the way she's been taught from the age of ten. “That I needed anyone to _tell_ me you've never given me the respect due an apprentice?”

Luminara's blade twitches; it's a transparent feint, and Barriss doesn't so much as blink.

“You're a coward,” she whispers. “You've never given me access to anything you could justify keeping from me. You stopped sparring with me once I'd established a fighting style you approved of—”

“And you expected differently?” Luminara raises an eyebrow and takes a step forward. Barriss sidesteps and raises her guard warningly; Luminara gives a humorless smile. “Stand down, girl. Don't advertise your ignorance. Did you think real power would be handed to you? No true Sith shares their secrets with an apprentice who lacks the drive and discipline to master them.”

“You've tortured me for speaking out of turn since I was a _child!_ ”

Another hard throw in the Force; this time it's Barriss who begins it, flinging out her hand and sending a wall of power surging across the room. The expected strain never builds, her master's brief push glancing off her own and into oblivion. Luminara isn't even _trying_ to fight her.

“If you lack the strength and clarity of will to even claim power as your birthright, what makes you think you would be capable of wielding it? You have been tested every day since I plucked you half-starved out of a filthy snowbank, and until now those tests have found you unworthy. _D_ _espite my best efforts_.” Barriss bares her teeth at the mocking glint in Luminara's eyes as her master slowly advances on her. “I'd begun to wonder if I was wrong about your potential. If you want to be coddled and indulged, run off to Skywalker. I'll hardly stop you. Or you can put an end to this childish display of temper, and begin your proper studies.”

It's exactly what Luminara would do. It's how she's always functioned. The explanation is humiliatingly obvious.

It makes perfect sense.

And for a single, near-fatal heartbeat, Barriss hesitates.

The arc is blindingly fast; she senses its movement in the Force rather than sees it coming as Luminara twirls her hilt in her hand, sweeping it under Barriss' guard and driving for her heart. She doesn't have time to block, doesn't have time to dodge; so she tries to do both, twisting away as her blade moves too slow to intercept. She manages to catch Luminara's blade on the outside of her primary; they glance off one another just before it can burn her.

She retaliates instinctively, switching off her primary for a split second so it doesn't interfere with her left-hand blade as she swings it at her master's head.

Luminara also whirls out of the way. Unlike Barriss, she isn't quite fast enough; the smell of burned flesh accompanies a low hiss of pain as she leaps back.

Superficial; a shallow slice along her right cheek, a notch taken out of her ear. Painful, but negligible by Sith standards. Barely a scratch.

But the Force around her is suddenly _seething_.

“Where you get the _gall_ ,” she breathes, but Barriss is done listening.

A high strike from the right followed by a knee-height lightning cut from her secondary, both parried and answered with a thrust that nearly impales her; she snaps a swing kick into Luminara's ribs that makes her stumble, but only barely, and Barriss just manages to pull her leg back before a scarlet blur whips down. It misses her by so little the passing of the blade raises smoke.

Her advantage has always been in speed and precision, not strength; unfortunately, so is her master's.

Both blades whistle in unison as she spins to strike from above at Luminara's right shoulder; Luminara counters with all her weight behind it, forcing her into bladelock.

“You're _weak_ ,” Barriss gasps, sucking air through her teeth as she strains against the impasse, looking for a way out. “You just wouldn't risk giving me anything I could use against you.”

For once in her life, Luminara is beyond words. But her eyes burn with fury, dark and hot and _sharp_. Fire behind crystal.

Finally, out of the corner of her eye, Barriss spots her deliverance. Arms shaking, she meets her master's gaze and bares her teeth in a hunter's grin as two fingers leave her secondary hilt and _twitch_.

A boot-sized chunk of broken masonry leaps out of the darkness, spinning toward Luminara's head; she has no choice but to tear away. A flash of red and the bisected stone falls away harmlessly at her sides. Barriss is left reeling from the sudden lack of resistance; she tries and fails to rally, her wild lunge at Luminara's back slicing through thin air as her master throws herself into a backflip to land halfway across the chamber.

For a moment they stare at each other, regroup. It's Barriss who starts circling.

“You're scared of me.” She steps over a rough patch on the floor. “You knew this would happen if I ever stopped being afraid.”

“When you die here,” Luminara asks softly, “Shall I send a token to your lover? A lock of hair? Your head?”

She's never seen her master this angry. She should be terrified. Barriss shakes her head, teeth bared at the taunt. The reminder of Ahsoka only centers her.

“You should have just bought a slave,” she says.

Luminara's response is a low, full-throated laugh. “I _did_.”

Barriss doesn't remember moving, or the flash of scarlet on crimson as they meet. The clash itself is a blur; for all Ahsoka's optimism that Luminara would be a poor duelist with Barriss fighting all her battles for her, they're very close to being perfectly matched. She can't force her master onto the defensive; but neither can Luminara manage to overwhelm her, and that knowledge drives her on.

She blocks a strike at her throat; an ill-advised gut stab is answered with a blow that would have sliced her open from collarbone to hip if she hadn't managed to catch it on her primary at the last moment, singeing her shoulder in the process. She loses track of the exchange of blows, waiting, watching, until— _there_.

She wrenches Luminara's blade to the side, sweeps both of her own back and then down; an overhead blow that doesn't give Luminara a chance to take advantage of the opening, forces her to block. Only the secondary connects. Barriss throws her weight on it, levering the blade with all her strength so her master doesn't have the option of dropping the bladelock; her primary, which she'd never intended to lock with, sweeps out and around, angling to slip between her unguarded ribs.

There's no counter from this position; at the last moment, Luminara seems to realize that. She relaxes her wrists, letting her saber hilt give in under the pressure and sending Barriss' secondary sliding off it as she whirls away from the strike. Barriss' blades clash harmlessly together.

Before she even has time to curse the near miss, Barriss realizes her master isn't stopping.

Having twisted in a full circle to pull herself away from Barriss' lightsaber, Luminara takes advantage of her momentum rather than returning to a guard stance. Before Barriss has time to react her master's blade lashes out, scoring deep into the metal of her primary saber hilt as it severs the last three fingers on her right hand in a single, clean slice.

Her secondary blade comes up reflexively as Luminara reverses her strike, cleaving for Barriss' neck.

Then the pain hits.

Luminara's eyes flash with anticipation when Barriss' guard wavers dangerously; her primary hilt clatters to the ground as it slips from the circle of her thumb and index finger, the gash opened by her master glowing dimly. Her right hand feels like it's on fire, she can feel her pounding heartbeat in every nerveless inch; the exposed ends of bone are screaming against the cold air.

And it's _nothing_ , compared to her master's punishments.

If her mobility is hampered by pressing her burning hand to her stomach, animal instinct telling her to staunch nonexistent bleeding, it's not by much; the pain is enough to make her grit her teeth but not enough to distract her.

“You were right after all,” Barriss pants, reversing her grip to block. She has to give a tight smile as she blocks left-handed again and again, giving ground slowly, and watches Luminara's pleasure turn to irritation. “You _were_ teaching me something useful.”

Luminara swings at her head; Barriss switches back to a forward grip and throws the blow aside, barely manages to recover in time to block the next attack.

The pain may not be slowing her down; inability to use her right hand _is_.

There's another way; but she'll only have one chance. And now, like this, facing her master with fear starting to lace her veins, she's not certain she can do it.

Luminara makes the decision for her. With Barriss forced onto the defensive she's forcing her deeper into the chamber, away from the open center and into tight quarters where the collapsed ceiling prevents her from leaping out of range, and rubble hinders her movement. The ceiling and debris flash with crimson in a series of increasingly frantic parries as Barriss is backed into a corner.

Finally the stone slab over their heads is so close she can't retreat any further. For a moment she manages to stand her ground, takes a leaf from Ahsoka's book and kicks at Luminara's shin to no effect. Luminara disengages, makes a sweeping overhead strike that slices an angry scar into the ceiling as it bears down; Barriss scrapes the skin off her knuckles catching it but can't hold, drops to one knee under the force of it.

A hard, efficient cut from the side. Barriss tries to block it across her body, her weaker left arm is easily overpowered by the two-handed grip, and her secondary saber buries itself in the floor as her guard is thrown open.

Without room to even flinch back, Barriss has no hope of blocking the cold decapitation she can already sense coming.

For once in her life, she doesn't think. She takes hold of the Force presence surrounding her and uses it to dredge up every strike and insult she's suffered under her master, all the fear and pain and misery dragged up from every corner of her being, wrenched under her will and set aflame. She screams silently in the Force, and flings out the intact fingers of her right hand.

A white-hot bolt of compressed power strikes her master in the chest with all the force of fourteen years of suppressed rage.

Her handful of clandestine training sessions aren't enough to let Barriss hold lightning for very long; it takes practice, energy, reserves of power she's not yet able to access. She can barely manage a few moments, only a heartbeat of true galaxy-rending agony.

A heartbeat is more than she needs.

Luminara's lightsaber deactivates and drops as her fingers convulse. She starts to fall with it even before her eyes widen in shock and pain; and Barriss knows only too well what is happening to her body as lightning tears through it, turning her nerves to razors and her muscles to water. She knows only too well that unique terror, the certainty that the pain can never end, the despair when it finally does only to begin again. The dull crack of collapsing to a hard floor unable to so much as shield your face.

That much, at least, Luminara is spared. Barriss stands to meet her before she can hit the ground, and catches her with a saber through her heart.

* * *

Her hands are still shaking.

Barriss closes her eyes, hugging her knees to her chest and resting her forehead on them. Leaving the temple behind had been easier than she'd dared to hope; she hadn't even had to consult her notes to avoid or counter the more deadly obstacles, and she'd stumbled out of a hidden door and into the tangled mass of vines before falling to her knees and vomiting. Somehow being sick inside the temple would have felt disrespectful.

 _Force help me_ , she'd thought weakly, _what have I done?_

Eventually the cold wind and setting sun had driven her to her feet and back to the shuttle; with the shock and adrenaline fading the pain in her hand had gone from a low throb to sharp, spiking agony, but she hadn't dared stop to see to it. Having those ruins at her back...

She shudders. There had been no illusion anymore of being anything but powerless and small. Even now, sitting against a durasteel wall safely in hyperspace, she can feel it behind her.

Cold. Uncaring. Deadly. And horribly, hideously familiar.

The entire planet had felt like her master.

Barriss forces herself to take a deep breath and lifts her head. She'd pulled the first-aid kit off the wall once safely out of realspace, gotten suddenly dizzy, and has been curled up on the floor ever since. But there are things she has to do. She has to force _herself_ to do them, now. There's no one else holding the whip anymore.

 _Never again_.

She picks up a sealed bacta gel package. After a few unsuccessful attempts to get her trembling fingers to cooperate she tears it open with her teeth, wrinkling her nose at the taste; it's harmless enough, but there is a very good reason bacta is not meant to be ingested. She rubs the gel between the fingers of her good hand and starts dabbing it onto what's left of her saber hand. It's a process that involves a lot of wincing.

She goes through three of the tiny gel packs over the next several hours, applying two of them carefully with her fingers before the stubs are numb enough to bandage; the third is squeezed directly onto the exposed ends, a direct healing agent rather than a painkiller, as Barriss works a long roll of gauze free and starts to wrap her injured hand.

The urgent beeping of the navicomputer nearly makes her jump out of her skin.

Stumbling slightly over her own feet and trying to calm her pounding heart, Barriss hurries to the cockpit. She's lost track of time completely; the alarm is just the five-minute warning for realspace re-entry. She confirms the command, settles into the pilot's seat to wait.

She has so much to do.

And so little time to do it in. Her master's underworld contacts will get skittish and run if she doesn't contact them _before_ news gets out of Luminara's death. They'll disappear regardless if she isn't capable of demonstrating strength, an understanding of their precise service to her master and what they're expected to do, and—most importantly—her ability to continue paying them. The Pykes, the Hutts, Black Sun...crime syndicates will be easier to deal with simply because they're accustomed to working with unexpected regime changes, but they'll attempt to take advantage of her.

She'll need access to thorough accounting records, her master's investments, the tribute payments from protectorate worlds...

She doesn't even know where ninety percent of the rooms in the Tower are _located_. So, first things first: she needs to reach out to the slaves. That much she _has_ learned from Ahsoka. She needs to know how many of them there are, who oversees them, and she needs to have one show her around. Knowing the tower inside and out is essential. From there, she can work on consolidating resources, and then begin making a series of holocalls...

She takes a deep breath, and digs her fingernails into the armrests to stop herself from reflexively glancing over her shoulder.

Luminara's gone. She's dead. Barriss had made sure of that before fleeing the temple, driven by far too many stories of leaving a person for dead and living precisely long enough to regret it. She's dead. She isn't coming back. Barriss is beyond her reach.

She still shivers at even the thought of touching her master's belongings.

Former. Former master. _She's gone. She's dead. She's not coming back._ Maybe someday she'll believe it.

The shifting blue of hyperspace gives way to a dizzying rush of stars and then Coruscant springs up in front of her, night-side lights forming spiral patterns. From a distance, it looks almost peaceful.

Another series of urgent beeps jolt her out of her reverie.

A few awkward left-handed taps to the sensor array tell her the shuttle's detected a small lightly-armed vessel in the area; the lack of any further information or visual makes her frown and begin setting up an active scan, but the comm system pings before she can finish.

Firmly dismissing the many stories about vengeful Sith ghosts, Barriss opens a channel.

“Can I help—” She blinks as she registers the scowling face in the holo. “ _Ahsoka?_ ”

Ahsoka's face melts into overwhelming relief just long enough to make Barriss blink before she visibly brings herself under control. She's not very good at it, and there's a toothy grin threatening to break through even as she leans in and says, “Hey! You're _here!_ I mean—I promise I wasn't following you, I just...had a feeling. Is everything all right?”

 _Well_.

“That's a bit of a long story,” Barriss admits with a weak smile. “Did something happen?”

Ahsoka makes a face. “I guess not. I was training, and I had a sort of...vision, I guess? It was...never mind. But I sensed danger—Anakin's gonna _kill_ me for this, he said—” Ahsoka bites her lip and takes a deep breath, and is much more collected when she speaks again. “I apologize for the interruption. May I speak with your master? It's my responsibility to pass along what I saw, it concerns her.”

Barriss has no idea what Ahsoka sees in her face, but it makes her falter.

“Um...Barriss? I just...are you okay?”

Barriss swallows hard. “I'm afraid,” she says, “that's no longer an option. If you want to speak to the ranking Sith from that lineage...” She lifts her chin slightly. “I suppose you'll have to talk to me.”

Ahsoka's breath catches audibly, and then she just _stares_.

Barriss shifts. “What?”

“You did it.” Ahsoka's voice is low, faint enough it barely translates over the scratchy comm system; but even badly pixelated Barriss recognizes that intense, unblinking gaze. The hunger in her eyes. “You actually _did_ it.”

“Yes.” The fierce satisfaction in Ahsoka's face makes her smile widely in spite of her reservations. “Yes, I did. Why...are you looking at me like that?”

There's a pause.

“If I could dock with that shuttle,” Ahsoka says, breathless even over the comm, “I'd have you against the console before you could say my name.”

Flushing dramatically, Barriss ducks her head and fiddles with the loose end of the bandage she's been wrapping around her hand, tucking it securely into itself. “Well. You'll just have to—”

“What happened to your hand?” Ahsoka demands, the huskiness vanishing instantly.

“What? Oh.” Barriss raises her bandaged hand so Ahsoka can see it better, turns it from side to side. “It's a small enough price to pay, Ahsoka.”

Ahsoka watches her hand for a long moment. “She came that close?”

“Before I killed her, yes. Please don't worry about it, Ahsoka.”

Ahsoka shakes her head, but after a moment she sighs and nods once. “Yeah, all right. Just...tell me she died slowly.”

Barriss gives a small, apologetic smile. “Why would I give her time to become desperate? Quickly through the heart.”

“Didn't think she had one,” Ahsoka mutters, quietly enough that Barriss isn't certain she was supposed to hear; then, that cocky grin is back. “You're smarter than me. So, you want an escort? _Master?_ ”

Without the threat of lightning breathing down her neck, Barriss feels no need to suppress the thrill the words send through her.

“Be careful,” she murmurs. “I may decide I like hearing that.”

Ahsoka smirks and rests her elbows on her console, dropping her voice again. “Bet I can think of something you'll like better.”

“I'll hold you to it,” Barriss tells her sweetly. “Where are you, anyway?”

She jumps as searchlights flash just off her port bow. Squinting, she realizes she _can_ just make out the shape of Ahsoka's precious custom aethersprite, now that she knows where to look for it. Those stealth modifications are certainly working.

The blue-tinged flame of maneuvering thrusters kicks in as Ahsoka peels her ship to the side, giving Barriss access to the easiest landing vector for the tower.

“After you.”

Grinning from ear to ear, Barriss puts the shuttle on autopilot, and sits back for the ride.

Why _shouldn't_ she be happy, anyway?

This is her _birthright_. She's earned it, every bit of it. The same master who drilled into her time and again to never underestimate her opponent gave her less credit than she'd earned, and she's taken revenge for it.

Luminara's fate is no one's fault but her own. Barriss would have been proud to serve a master worthy of her.

Barriss closes her eyes and breathes deeply, reveling in her own sense of the Force, her own power stirring in every inch of her being. She's never fully been able to feel it before, not intimately, not like this. She's never dared. She never even knew this depth of connection was _there_.

An orphan castoff from a war-torn sector of a planet poor in everything but space to starve in—but the Force had _chosen_ her nonetheless. Power calls to power, that's a truth that burns in the blood of any Sith; and _she_ was the one who attracted the attention of one of the most influential Sith lords in the galaxy.

 _She_ had built herself up over the years, _she_ seized the opportunity when it was offered, trained and pushed herself to the limit to claim her own due. For a brief moment the thought feels ungrateful—but she dismisses that. It's not that she doesn't have a bone-deep gratitude for everything Ahsoka's done, she _does_ , she'd never have gotten here without her. That doesn't change anything. Barriss was the one who attracted Ahsoka's attention in the first place, _she_ had cultivated that connection, followed her instincts, chased what she wanted when her master would have had her suppress her emotions like a _Jedi_.

Master Unduli had taken her as a slave; the Force has set her free.

She's done with being prey. Done with living her life as a slave to the whims and orders of a woman blind to the true power of the Dark Side.

Barriss barely registers the shuttle settling into the landing bay, flicks the engines off out of habit more than conscious thought, and drops the landing ramp with the Force rather than waste time using controls when she knows what she wants.

Ahsoka's landing thrusters have just died when Barriss steps off the ramp; heat is still rising from the purring engines. She ignores it, taking long strides across the landing bay as the starfighter's systems are shut off one by one. By the time Ahsoka finally pops the cockpit and drops to the ground, she barely has time to grin before Barriss braces her hands against Ahsoka's shoulders, shoves her roughly against the aethersprite's hull without breaking stride and bites down on her throat.

“ _Ah!_ ”

Barriss ignores Ahsoka's yelp, pressing into her and dragging hands along her body; after a moment she lets go with her teeth and works at Ahsoka's neck with lips and tongue, tugging at her clothes with her good hand, trying to get as close as she can.

“Mine,” she breathes. “You're _mine_.”

Powerful fingers fist in her hair, tearing her away from Ahsoka's throat, forcing her head back; she takes her revenge by meeting Ahsoka's kiss halfway and turning it around on her. She clutches a lek, fingernails digging into the sensitive underside, while her bandaged saber hand rests on Ahsoka's throat—not pressing, but suggesting that she _could_ , if she wanted to. Ahsoka hisses, tries to nip at her jaw, and snarls when Barriss tugs her back for a long, hard kiss that makes her claim eminently clear.

“Mine,” she mumbles again into Ahsoka's mouth, when she pulls back briefly to breathe. And then, muffled in open-mouthed kisses against a strong orange jaw, “Mine, mine, I _want_ you...”

This time she doesn't protest when Ahsoka drags her head back, hooks an arm around her waist to bend Barriss against her body with the kiss. After a long moment she pulls away, holding Barriss in place with both hands in her hair and watching her intently for no clear purpose.

“...I won't beg—”

“You should see your eyes right now,” Ahsoka interrupts, nearly panting.

“My...?”

“They're yellow.” Ahsoka's tongue dips between her lips. “Gold. I—I've seen it before—Anakin, sometimes—but with you it's just—” Nails dig into Barriss' sides as she's dragged close into a desperate, sloppy kiss.

“You approve?” she gasps.

Ahsoka gives a sharp grin. “I think it suits you.”

Barriss gives an undignified whine and drags her nails roughly down Ahsoka's lek, earning a sharp hiss of pain. And then Ahsoka's hands are on her, deliciously selfish, in her clothes and burning over her skin. Barriss has never been able to resist her; she lets her head fall back with a faint moan and sharp teeth make their way along her throat, until Ahsoka moves to push her down on the wing of the starfighter.

Barriss is far too drunk on victory to be having with _that_.

Ahsoka actually laughs as Barriss turns to shove her against the matte-black wing, climbing into her lap and pinning her wrists.

“Did I say you could touch me?” she mumbles into Ahsoka's neck, accompanied by a sharp nip.

Ahsoka snickers, kisses Barriss' throat before tugging her left hand free and sliding it into Barriss' hair. She casually lays back, pulling Barriss down with her and into a hungry kiss.

“I don't hear any complaints.” She smirks and tightens her grip on the back of Barriss' neck before hauling her closer to suck at the base of her jaw. Barriss' hold on her wrist loosens as she gasps, and Ahsoka wastes no time freeing that hand as well. For a moment it goes to her waist, then fingernails scrape faintly over her stomach before Ahsoka slips her hand under Barriss' waistband.

It's hurried and shallow and unsatisfying, but Barriss has been simmering with _want_ since she saw Ahsoka's face and she'll take what she can get. It doesn't take long for a curl of talented fingers to send her over; Ahsoka, visibly frustrated, barely waits until Barriss has stopped shaking against her before trying to roll them over and find a better angle.

With the edge taken off, Barriss has just enough self-control to shake her head and place her fingers over Ahsoka's lips, silencing her complaint.

“I have to—stop that,” she says sternly as Ahsoka's tongue flicks over her fingers. “I have to...do something.” She knows what needs to be done, immediately, tonight—she's just not capable of forming coherent sentences right now. Ahsoka's hands running up the backs of her thighs are not helping.

She has to establish control here first. Before she does anything else she needs to lock down the tower until she knows exactly how she intends to present herself to the slaves. The time she's spent with Ahsoka has her thinking vaguely about freeing at least some of them, but that can be decided later; first she has to stop word from spreading until she's ready for it.

She'll look to her household in the morning. For now, she just wants to take what security measures are absolutely necessary to let her enjoy Ahsoka's presence without anxiety niggling in the back of her mind.

“Give me twenty minutes?” she pleads. Ahsoka makes a reluctant noise in her throat, kissing her way up Barriss' jugular. Barriss lets her get away with it for a moment before tilting Ahsoka's head back with one hand on her montral. “I'll make it worth the wait.”

Ahsoka makes a show of considering it before heaving a sigh and sitting back. “Well, since you're cute when you're all worked up...”

“Always a gentleman,” Barriss mutters, and slips off the aethersprite's wing.

* * *

The hangar bay door slides shut behind Barriss, and Ahsoka stretches. She _enjoys_ it, too; after any length of time in a starfighter cockpit, even a heavily-altered one with as much leg room as possible, it's always nice to be able to get in a proper catlike stretch and crack her back a bit. She feels _great_ , relaxed and confident, right up until she glances to the side and sees the aethersprite's comm system flashing angrily.

Again.

Well, she can't put it off any longer. Groaning preemptively, she taps her comlink awake and waves her fingers, using the Force to patch the message through. At least it's voice-only instead of a holo.

Unable to keep the sheepishness out of her voice, she clears her throat. “...Hey, Master!”

There's silence for a long moment. Then:

“ _You have_ fifteen minutes _to be standing in my office._ ”

Ahsoka winces. “Look, it's...it's kind of a long story—”

“ _Oh yeah?_ ” Anakin doesn't sound impressed. “ _Does it involve Unduli giving you explicit written permission to be on her territory, or did you think disabling the primary locator beacon would stop me from tracking that starfighter you love so much?_ ”

“You put a tracker on my ship?!” Ahsoka demands, momentarily distracted.

She's sure she's just imagining the hint of cold fury in the Force.

Her master's voice sounds suspiciously like he's speaking through clenched teeth. “ _It must be malfunctioning. Because I_ know _you're not stupid enough to be at Unduli's tower_.”

“Not exactly...”

“ _Yeah_ ,” growls Anakin. “ _That's what I thought. Get back here._ Now _. I have to decide what to do with you.”_

“But—” Ahsoka starts, and realizes instantly that she's snapped the last thread of Anakin's fragile temper.

“ _I GAVE YOU AN ORDER, AHSOKA!_ ”

Ahsoka winces and hastily turns down the volume on her comlink, but scowls at it anyway.

“Look,” she says. “I'm sorry I ran off without permission, okay? But I didn't _do_ anything, so stop yelling at me!”

Anakin makes a choked, incredulous noise that over the static-filled comlink sounds like he's coughing up a hairball. “ _Didn't—you disobeyed a_ direct order! _If you think that's nothing, maybe I really_ am _too soft with you! Well, I'll tell you this much, you can forget about leaving the complex for the next standard year—I'll tap one of the other pilots for Boonta Eve, you can stay home and pull your weight like everyone else—_ ”

“ _What?_ ” Ahsoka leaps to her feet, the empty hangar bay echoing as she lands on the durasteel floor. “That's not fair!”

“ _I'll_ _show you unfair_ _if you're not back here in fifteen minutes!_ ” Anakin shouts. “ _You're already looking at a month in an isolation cell, you want to make it three? Keep this up!_ ”

Ahsoka stares at her comlink in shock for several heartbeats, then abruptly gives a rippling snarl of fury.

“You can't do that!”

“ _Try me_ _!_ ” She can feel his anger pounding against her ribs like he's in the room. “ _I told you what was at stake here,_ _but_ _obviously you need a better lesson!_ _You were given_ _an_ order _not to risk provoking Unduli_ —”

Ahsoka's hands ball into fists as she glares at her comlink and shouts back, “Well she's _dead_ , so I don't think it matters how much I provoke her anymore, _Master!_ ”

The silence is longer this time.

“How do you know that?” Anakin asks, his voice suddenly quiet and even.

Ahsoka cautiously turns the volume back up, still scowling at her wrist. “I had a vision, sort of. I thought she killed Barriss so I went to—”

Actually it's probably best if she doesn't finish that sentence, she's in enough trouble already.

“So,” she says before Anakin has a chance to say anything, “Barriss confirmed it. And she...feels different. She's been planning to kill her anyway.”

“ _Uh-huh. And you had_ nothing _to do with it._ ”

“No,” Ahsoka says petulantly. “You never _ordered me_ to plug my ears and sing Wookiee carols every time she mentioned her master. I knew she wanted to kill Unduli, but she did it all by herself. Satisfied?”

“ _Are you telling me everything, Ahsoka?_ ” He's not yelling anymore, but the dangerous undertone hasn't left his voice. “ _Because I guarantee whatever you're trying to avoid is gonna be a lot worse when I find out you lied to me._ ”

Ahsoka is fully aware that she's sulking. “I'm not _lying_. I told you we've been training together, it's not my fault you didn't believe me.” He'd mostly looked amused at her phrasing. They really _had_ been training sessions, all right?

“ _I don't like your tone.”_

“You started it,” she mutters.

He chooses to ignore her.

“ _Fine_.” She can almost hear him crossing his arms. “ _In light of the extenuating circumstances, I'll waive your punishment. But I want you back here_ right now.”

“Master,” Ahsoka complains.

Anakin responds, “ _Hey! Don't push your luck, Ahsoka. You still left while you were supposed to be training, without asking permission,_ and _you violated a rival's airspace when I specifically told you not to. If you think you're getting out of this without at least some extra chores you'd better think again._ ”

“I don't want to leave Barriss right now,” Ahsoka pleads.

Anakin scoffs audibly. “ _I'm sure._ ”

“I'm serious! She asked me to stay.” Not in as many words, maybe, but she'd been pretty clear about what she wanted. “I'm worried about what being in this place alone is gonna do to her, okay? I just want to spend the night.”

“ _That doesn't mean you're allowed to. I still haven't heard you ask, you know. Just because I'm not Unduli doesn't mean I appreciate disrespect._ ”

“Please, Master?” When he doesn't respond right away, Ahsoka points out, “It's just one night, is that really so much when I just got us a powerful ally?”

Anakin actually laughs at that. “ _Don't get ahead of yourself, you're not that cute._ ”

“Oh yeah?” she challenges. “You just wait. Once she's stable here—”

“ _If she_ gets _stable_ ,” Anakin says. “ _I'm not convinced_ _anyone who's spent her whole life being cowed_ _can handle it_.”

“ _When_ she's stable,” Ahsoka says firmly. “You need a favor, I bet we can ask her for it. I'm pretty persuasive, you know.” Suddenly she remembers something. “Oh, hey. Can you send me the contact information for Doctor, uh...you know, the prosthetic guy?”

Anakin's operation employs thousands of people. Almost all of them work in constant, direct contact with incredibly powerful machinery, razor-sharp edges, open flames, hot metal, and/or extremely destructive races that rarely feature less than half the field suffering fatal crashes at speeds high enough to liquify the organs of most sentient species if the racers didn't feature failsafe inertia dampeners.

They have the galactic prosthetics experts for fifty-nine species on speed-dial.

Anakin sighs. “ _Your girlfriend okay?_ ”

“Most of her.”

There's a pause during which Ahsoka chews her lip waiting for her master's verdict.

“ _All right_ ,” he finally says. “ _I can't expect you to ignore your feelings. But you've got to learn control someday and you're not getting off easy for disappearing without asking permission when you had duties you hadn't finished. So_ —”

“It was an emergency, though,” Ahsoka can't help but point out.

“So _here's the deal_ ,” Anakin continues in a warning tone. Ahsoka shuts up. “ _If you're standing in front of me with a real apology in the next half an hour, we'll let this slide._ ”

“No extra chores?” says Ahsoka hopefully.

“ _Nice try. Or you can take thirty-six hours to take care of your girlfriend and try to foster a real alliance. I'm not gonna be happy if you forget the second half_.”

“Okay!” The answer comes quickly. “I can do that!”

“ _Fine. But if that's what you decide to do, you're agreeing to being grounded for three months to make up for it_.” Ahsoka sticks her tongue out at her comlink but doesn't protest; that's a fair enough trade. “ _And I_ mean _grounded. You don't leave the complex without asking and you don't touch the controls of anything with an engine, or I really will throw you in an isolation cell to cool off._ _You take civilian transports if you need to._ ”

Ugh. Ahsoka casts a longing glance at her beautiful stealth fighter. Last time she was grounded Anakin had sealed her hangar bay _to remove temptation_. She'd called it the next best thing to torture, and that had only been for three _weeks_.

“...Can I have visitors?”

“ _Not during the time you're scheduled for working or training. And I'm not out to ruin your fun, but if you have to cancel plans because I have an assignment for you I don't want to hear a word about it._ ”

Well, _that's_ nothing to write home about. That's just the same common-sense ground rules as always. Barriss is probably gonna be busy for the next few months anyway.

Finally she heaves a sigh.

“Fine,” she grumbles. “Deal.”

“ _Ten minutes to change your mind if you hurry,_ ” Anakin reminds her. “ _And I expect that apology either way._ ”

“Yeah, fine, can I go now?”

“ _Thin ice, Ahsoka. You're flying a prototype and I can still pull it for R &D if I want to, you know._”

“You wouldn't!”

Her comlink gives a distorted chuckle. “ _I won't take your baby unless you give me a really good reason. You can go._ ”

Ahsoka rolls her eyes. “Whatever. See you in thirty-six hours.”

“ _What's that? You volunteer for data entry?”_

A long sigh. “I'll be back in thirty-six hours as per your instructions, _my master_ , thank you _so_ much for your permission, I'm _very_ grateful.”

“ _That's what I thought._ ”

Ahsoka turns off her comlink before he decides to blackmail her into anything else. Then she tosses it into the starfighter's cockpit for good measure. And _then_ she finally notices the slave standing patiently by the door.

She's a young Pantoran woman, no surprise there, with short, choppy lilac hair. Ahsoka can only assume the nondescript steel-blue tunic and canvas pants are a sort of uniform, and frowns slightly. If Barriss deals with slavers after this, they're gonna need to have a talk.

The girl looks nervous, so Ahsoka hurriedly forces the frown off her face and smiles. Looking slightly less anxious, the slave bows to her.

“My mistress wishes me to show you to her rooms,” she says quietly, keeping her eyes lowered. “At your convenience, of course, Lady.”

Ahsoka's glad the woman's not looking at her face, because she's cringing. It's not like she's never seen this before—quite a few of their production, accounting, and inventory people were even worse when Anakin...kidnapped them. Nicely. Even one or two of the engineers and mechanics, though the ones who are this nervous generally prefer quieter jobs with clear instructions. It just never gets any easier to see sentients who are this used to being treated like furniture.

She takes a moment to make sure she's got control over her voice; this was one of the very first lessons Anakin taught her, how to talk to their rescues, and this poor girl's already seen her shouting so she probably expects more of it.

“We can go now, if you like,” she offers, folding her hands behind her back so she looks less threatening. The slave doesn't react except to bow again and tap the door open, standing aside. Ahsoka goes through, but turns to walk backward facing her. “And you can call me whatever you're comfortable with, but you don't have to use a title or anything. My name's Ahsoka. I was a slave too when my master found me, I'm definitely no lady. Okay?”

The Pantoran glances at her and then turns down a hallway. “As you wish, Lady.”

Ahsoka tries to smile. “We'll work on it.”

She decides not to push her guide as they make their way through the tower. She knows from Barriss that one of only two entrances to Luminara's quarters is through her apprentice's room, which is just creepy. But the doors she's led to open on a lift, which the slave steps into, holding the doors for Ahsoka. Once she's inside they slide shut with a disturbing click like a lock closing. The girl presses the only button on the inside panel, and then folds her hands.

After a short pause, the lift starts moving.

“I've never been this way,” Ahsoka's guide whispers, looking over like she's afraid of being yelled at for speaking out of turn.

“Really? Why not?”

Some of the fear leaves the Pantoran's eyes at the encouragement, but her voice is still barely audible as she continues, “I wasn't allowed. Only a few of us were allowed into my—the old mistress' quarters to clean.” She nods toward the panel. “The button doesn't control the lift itself. It only sends a signal. _She_ had the commands to call it it when we ask." A moment of hesitation, as the girl gauges her reaction. Hesitantly, she offers, "I had a human friend once. He was allowed up.” Ahsoka winces at the phrasing and is smart enough not to ask what happened to them. “He said one time, our mistress was asleep and he was trapped in here for six hours until she woke up and saw the request alert.”

“He couldn't get out?”

“Of course not. Then she wouldn't know if someone had tried and failed to sneak upstairs without permission. Once the doors close, they only open again if you have the proper commands.”

Okay. Ahsoka has to admit, that's actually a really good security measure. It's _insane_ , but she can't argue it wouldn't work.

“Things are probably gonna change around here,” she says. “What do you think of Barriss, anyway? If I promise not to tell her what you say?”

No response.

Ahsoka sighs. “Yeah. Okay. I wouldn't tell me either, it's fine. Don't worry about it.”

The girl gives a faint nod as the doors open. “My mistress is waiting for you in the last door on the left,” she says. “Do you require anything else, Lady?”

“No, I'm—actually.” Ahsoka looks back. “What's your name?”

She blinks, looking like Ahsoka's slapped her. “I...my name is Riyo, Lady.”

Ahsoka grins. “Nice to meet you, Riyo.”

Last door on the left. Well, that's not hard—all the doors are on the left, except for a one arch that leads to a dark spiral staircase. Probably better not to think about where _that_ might go.

There's a buzzer on the door; Ahsoka ignores it, knocking on the white-painted durasteel instead. The door slides open immediately.

Ahsoka steps inside, and her eyebrows shoot up.

It's not a bedroom, which is...kind of a relief, actually, with Unduli barely a few hours dead. But it's a pretty nice room; wall sconces with warm yellow-orange bulbs like lanterns, actual fabric wall coverings to muffle the awful acoustics in this place, and the flooring smells and sounds like it might even be real wood. A synthetic rug in the middle of the room is thin but looks soft even from here, and while the single armchair is too formal to look truly relaxing it at least looks comfortable. Ahsoka suspects some of the curtains against the back wall conceal a panel or two of sunboxes, fake sunlight spectrum lights like the ones Anakin has in their underground facilities.

Looks like Unduli had a concept of comfort after all. This is definitely a private workroom, not the office she'd normally have used.

Of course, with Barriss there, she has better things to admire than the furniture.

Ahsoka's absolutely certain she's never seen Barriss in _this_ before. She'd have remembered. Solid deep-space black, rippling satin where it's not synthleather; the long slit skirt is loose but the rest of the dress is nearly skintight, a strapless design that leaves olive shoulders bare. There are small black pearls at her ears; it occurs to Ahsoka that she's never noticed whether Barriss' ears are pierced or not. It isn't the kind of thing togruta generally pay attention to.

Barriss isn't looking at her when she comes in. She's standing across the room, one gloved hand drifting along the immaculately polished edge of a beautiful wooden desk. Probably Endor irontree, which isn't anywhere in the neighborhood of cheap.

Ahsoka crosses her arms and drinks in the view as the door slides shut behind her. After a moment, Barriss glances back with a vague smile.

“Do you like it?” she asks faintly. Ahsoka's tongue darts out to wet her lips before she can stop it, and Barriss' smile becomes more genuine for a moment. “It was a gift, of sorts. From my master.”

Her fingers skate over a silver device on the desk, so light Ahsoka doubts it would even disturb the dust if there had been any.

“Her underworld informants would chafe at the bit far more often than more professional contractors, but they were necessary and difficult to replace. She had to keep them in line. Maintain their view of their employer as powerful. Untouchable. It...suited her, to have me there. I was something they desired, and I belonged to her. It was a silent reminder, and a distraction. Sensible.” Her voice shakes. “There was no reason for me to hesitate. Taking advantage of an informant's base weaknesses—what kind of Sith would be upset by...It would have been foolish for my master to waste a tool that could have been used to her advantage.”

Unduli's lucky Barriss got to her first.

For almost a minute Barriss is lost in her own world, still and silent, staring at her master's desk. Finally she takes a deep breath.

“Ahsoka?” she says, turning. She braces her hands behind her, leaning on the ironwood desk.

Ahsoka doesn't answer, but she looks Barriss in the eye and tries to communicate without words that here, now, tonight, she can have absolutely anything she wants.

Barriss smiles grimly.

“Tear it to _pieces_.”

Ahsoka grins.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And a round of applause for my awesome beta Kablob, without whom none of this, specifically a certain cameo, would have happened.
> 
> Damned if I'm not dragging everyone I can reach to hell with me.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [On the Wall](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5338586) by [HkHk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HkHk/pseuds/HkHk)




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